10.1Ontology of social power

Has an ontology of social power ever been adequately worked out in political philosophy and modern social science? The answer is: No. As noted in the Foreword, modern social science is per se blind to the ontological difference, and, for reasons investigated in previous chapters (cf. especially Chapter 5)), political philosophy has never succeeded in developing a socio-ontology of power interplay. Political and social power are such ubiquitous, thoroughly familiar phenomena that it seems possible to skip the question concerning what they are, to presuppose a preconception of the spectrum of phenomena (which are, indeed, very well understood) and to talk endlessly about them in a pseudo-philosophical, mostly narrative, or perhaps logically syllogistic fashion (e.g. so-called consequentialism). This is the usual situation with simple, fundamental phenomena: they seem to be so well-known and familiar and self-evident that it would be superfluous to try to give anything more than a definition of the concept. Familiarity with a phenomenon in all its nuances generally makes us blind to questioning its mode of being, thus posing a genuinely ontological question. There seems to be no point at which thinking could gain a purchase on it so that it would open up its depths and mystery, its questionableness. Thus we remain blinded by obviousness and dismiss the suggestion that there could even be a depth to what seems self-evident, obvious and even trivial.

“We”: that is all except a handful of singular individuals who suffer themselves to be drawn into that deeper kind of ontological interrogation of the phenomena bequeathed to us by the Greeks as encapsulated in the inconspicuous word ‘as’. And yet, there is a way to make the phenomenon of power reveal its ontological secrets by returning to the metaphysical tradition, for it has by no means been entirely neglected. Aristotle offers a source which, to the present day, has not been tapped with respect to the question of the ontology of specifically social and political power, the socio-ontological question par excellence that has been pursued and unfolded in preceding chapters. The philosopher whose name in recent years has most been associated with the phenomenality of political and social power is Michel Foucault, and yet he and his many disciples never raise the question concerning the ontological structure of political and social power as modes of social, sociating movement. They are wilfully blind and oblivious to it, and therefore perforce implicitly, unwittingly and unavoidably adopt the ontology of productive power. In the absence of an explicit ontology of social power, the phenomena of social power can only show themselves in a distorted fashion through pre-ontological misconceptions.

It has to be said that the phenomenon and concept of power lie at the heart of Aristotle’s ontology under the names ἀρχή and δύναμις in connection with the problem of grasping the phenomenon of movement/change as a mode of being — a major issue for Greek philosophy from Parmenides on. Chapter 5 on the Ontology of Exchange178 has explored δύναμις with regard to the phenomena of commodity exchange and social interchange, which already represents a side-step out of traditional metaphysical ontology. Why? Because the ontology of power offered by the tradition, starting with Aristotle, is exclusively that of productive power (δύναμις ποιητική, a collocation occurring in Aristotle at Met. Delta 1021a15 and generally mistranslated as ‘active potential’, is the complementary concept to δύναμις παθητική (1021a15), the passive power to suffer the energy of a productive power). This ontology of productive power has only, by sleight of hand, been thoughtlessly transferred to phenomena of social power (δύναμις κοινωνική a collocation that, as far as I know, does not occur in Greek philosophy).179

Here I will focus on the phenomenon and concept of ἀρχή which is dealt with first of all in the famous book of definitions, Book Delta of the Metaphysics, as the very first chapter. Like all elementary, simple concepts, ἀρχή, too, is “said in several ways”, and all but one of Aristotle’s definitions of ἀρχή start with saying that ἀρχή is ὅθεν, i.e. “from where” or “whence” something has its beginning. Aristotle says explicitly that “of all the various meanings of ἀρχή what is common is to be the first whence something either is or becomes or is known” (πασῶν μὲν οὖν κοινὸν τῶν ἀρχῶν τὸ πρῶτον εἶναι ὅθεν ἢ ἔστιν ἢ γίγνεται ἢ γιγνώσκεται· 1013a17). An ἀρχή is therefore a “whence”.

The concept of ἀρχή is essential to Aristotle’s treatment of one of his most important and characteristic ontological categories, that of δύναμις, for the latter is defined in Book Theta of the Metaphysics to be a kind of ἀρχή having dominion over change in something else. According to the seminal Book Theta, and thus unquestioningly and implicitly for the entire philosophical tradition, power is always power to effect a change in something else. It makes not one iota of difference when synonyms for social and political power such as ‘control’, ‘governance’, ‘force’, ‘violence’, ‘coercion’, ‘discipline’, etc. are employed, as if these words captured the essence or essential ontological differences. Such proliferation of synonyms only muddies and covers up the ontological issue in more or less sophisticated, sophistic ways. The guiding, paradigmatic phenomenon for Aristotle’s consideration of δύναμις (power) is that of productive τέχνη, i.e. the know-how to effect a change in something else in bringing something forth, in pro-ducing. And this understanding of τέχνη is also explicitly linked by Aristotle with political power in his run through various meanings of ἀρχή in Book Delta when he writes:

ἡ δὲ οὗ κατὰ προαίρεσιν κινεῖται τὰ κινούμενα καὶ μεταβάλλει τὰ μεταβάλλοντα, ὥσπερ αἱ τε κατὰ πόλεις ἀρχαὶ καὶ αἱ δυναστεῖαι καὶ αἱ βασιλεῖαι καὶ τυραννίδες ἀρχαὶ λέγονται καὶ αἱ τέχναι, καὶ τούτων αἱ ἀρχιτεκτονικαὶ μάλιστα. (Met. Delta 1 1013a10)

Another meaning of ἀρχή is that of a deliberate purpose according to which something which is moved moves or something which is changed changes, such as political magistracies (ἀρχαί), and régimes (δυναστεῖαι) and kingdoms and tyrannies are said to be ἀρχαί, and also the know-hows (τέχναι) and of these most of all the architectonic know-hows.

This linking means that power in the sense of political rule and dominion is said to have the same ontological structure as that of the power (δύναμις) of productive technical know-how (τέχνη ποιητική) in the sense that both, as modes of being, are the starting-point governing, or a whence having dominion over, a change in something else (ἀρχὴ μεταβολῆς ἐν ἄλλῳ Met. Theta 1, 1046a9f). But the “something else” is different in each case. In the case of technical knowhow, the power is a power to bring about a change in manipulable things considered in the ‘third person’. The example of medical knowledge makes this particularly clear, since medical know-how is able to bring about a change in a human considered as a body, i.e. as a ‘thing’, rather than as a free-willed being. Once again, the inconspicuous Greek word ᾗ (as, qua) plays a crucial role (cf. Foreword).

Political power, on the other hand, concerns the rule over human beings and is insofar a social interplay between and among human beings. Political power is an estimating social interplay in the sense of being, still in line with Aristotle’s productive definition of δύναμις, a point of emanation (a principal, head, leader) for bringing about a change in other human beings according to a deliberate plan or purpose. As Joseph Nye puts it, unknowingly echoing Plato’s Gorgias, power is “the ability to obtain the outcomes one wants”.180 Such a change can be understood as obedience to a command, an order, which may or may not be formulated as a law or, in a ‘softer’ version, compliance with one’s wishes, or in an even softer version, making an impression on others (e.g. a man’s expensive hand-made shoes, a woman’s flashing red lips181). For example, a magistrate holding an office entrusted with the administration of justice can, i.e. has the power to, order an offender who has infringed the law to be fined, imprisoned or otherwise punished. The magistracy is thus a source of emanation of political power over others, and the holder of this office holds and exercises specifically political power, here in the garb of judicial power. This ontologically unclarified preconception of political power is echoed even more than two millennia later in the modern social science of sociology, when Max Weber e.g. defines the phenomenon of ruling others, of rule or Herrschaft, “Rule, i.e. the chance of finding obedience for a certain command.”182 This definition at least implicitly admits the uncertainty of political power, but by no means approaches an adequate socio-ontological conception.

Those subjected to political rule, namely, are humans regarded as humans, and not humans regarded as bodies (as in the case of medical know-how), and thus the relation of political power is one of power over beings in the ‘second person’, as an other human being, and not merely power over things (or humans regarded as bodily things, as ‘patients’ in the ‘third person’ who ‘suffer’ passively (πάσχειν) to have changes made to them). The relation of political power is that of the subjection of one human will to another, dominant human will in contrast to, say, a relation of agreement (a concurring of wills) on a course of action as in the case of the exchange of commodities or an interchange of views on how best to proceed regarding some practical issue (such as organizing a work process within a company).

To get a better overview of what the phenomenon of Greek δύναμις encompasses, it is instructive to look first at the range of lexicographic meanings, not in order to do ‘dictionary phenomenology’, but to allow related phenomena to pass review before the mind’s eye. The basic meaning is ‘force’, ‘Kraft’ or ‘power’. This force may be the physical force of brute physical strength (e.g. to bend steel or knock someone out using one’s fists), or the force of armed forces such as an army or navy (e.g. to defeat an enemy in combat, which depends ultimately on the power to physically kill by destroying the body as a thing using suitable weapons). In armed combat, two (or more) opposed military forces estimate each other as enemies, estimating, in particular, the enemy’s potential military force. Military force can be employed to ‘beat an enemy into submission’ but, significantly, the act of submission is performed by the enemy in estimating that the other side is a superior military power. Hostilities may cease also by the two sides achieving a political resolution, again on the basis of mutually estimating each others strengths, including military strength.

Δύναμις is also the power of an ability, a competence or skill based on know-how, such as knowing how to play the guitar or make a bookshelf, both kinds of productive power. In particular, it is also rhetorical skill, the power of persuasion to win trust and bring others around to a particular view by force of what the speaker says, how winningly he says it and and the charisma of who is speaking. In the social realm, δύναμις is ‘influence’, ‘personal importance and prestige that carries weight’, i.e. the power to impress others, and also specifically the ‘political power’ of public office, but all these are no longer simply productive powers, but power interplay. Δύναμις is also ‘the meaning of a word’, ‘valuable assets’ or ‘the monetary value of something’, i.e. the power of one thing (assets, money) to bring something else into one’s possession. One signification of the related verb, δύνασθαι, is ‘to be worth’, as in ‘five shoes are worth one table’, i.e. five shoes have the power to exchange for, i.e. to acquire, to bring into one’s possession, one table. Exchange-value is therefore a social power, an observation whose importance cannot be overemphasized. The standard Latin translation of δύνασθαι is ‘valere’183 which means ‘to be strong, powerful, influential; also, to have value, including monetary value, to be worth’.

The phenomena of social and political power are therefore situated in the realm of mutual estimation and esteeming among human beings and their goods, and therefore they cannot be approached without a clearsightedness for the dimension of whoness, of estimating who-interplay. Of course, the ontological question concerning social and political power arises only with a plurality of human beings sharing a world and concerns power-playful relations, not substance. A determination of human being, say, as animal rationale (which includes animal irrationale) therefore leaves the problematic of social and political power grossly underdetermined.

The power of money can be understood from the ontology of exchange as laid out in Chapter 5. As underscored already many times, it is not a power like productive power, which is the power to “bring forth a change in something else”, but the power to purchase in exchange anything or anyone, i.e. anywhat or anywho, offered for sale or hire, which depends firstly upon what is offered itself being estimated as a value (and thus as having a power of exchange, such as labour-power that is valuable in producing things or performing services, or commodity goods that are valuable for some use or other), and secondly upon the possessor of that offering being willing to offer and to actually exchange, so that two powers (in the sense of being valuable) must reciprocally intermesh concurringly in an interchange, which is therefore always also an estimating interplay, a power play, and never the one-sided exercise of a power or force having dominion from a single origin to cause an effect, i.e. never simply productive power. The game that is the interplay of exchange can never be adequately grasped ontologically in terms of the schema of cause and effect derived from productionist ontology, but only through its ontological structure sui generis.

The terms “game” and “power play” do not imply here an ontologically lightweight, merely playful, frivolous phenomenon; rather, here they are accorded the grave ontological weight due to them as fundamental ‘speculative’ concepts of human sociation in society. One immediate corollary of this insight into the ontological structure of social power as mutually estimating interplay is that social freedom itself can never be conceived as the freedom of individuals to do what they like, for all social freedom in its exercise or ἐνέργεια is an intermeshing with others, and therefore the individual comes up against the other as a likewise free individual exercising its own powers, whatever they may be. In this sense, freedom is always essentially negotiated in a power play. Even the freedom to withdraw into one’s private sphere and exercise one’s caprice within this sphere is the ongoing outcome of a social power play in which it is decided politically where, precisely, the limits of the private sphere are to be drawn. Individual freedom, considered as social freedom, can only ever be the freedom of the individual to play in a power play with others according to rules of justice that are more or less fair, more or less beautiful. The notion of an individualist society of individuals being free to arbitrarily exercise their individual will denies the ontological insight that human social living is essentially, ineluctably a power interplay whose outcome, moreover, is ongoing, shifting, always becoming.

But let us continue our review of the various phenomena of social power.

The possessor or owner of money and assets furthermore has power and influence mediated through the power of money to acquire all sorts of material and more intangible goods simply because money is a reified social power that literally, as res or thing, can be handed over to another. These are interchanges played out in the sociating medium of reified value. In this way, money becomes the social power of capital, which can command not only labour power, but means of production and land, and also a lending price called interest. The reified power of money and capital extends to social status, prestige and influence, including political influence, enjoyed above all by the wealthy, thus demonstrating how one kind of social power can encroach on and commingle with another.

There is also political power proper within the state by virtue of holding some public office, whether it be that of a magistrate, a king, a member of parliament, a minister in the government, a government bureaucrat, a police officer, a military officer, a customs official, etc. within a constituted polity. Such power is not exercised merely through brute physical force, which is the exception, even though political power is backed up by the possibility (δύναμις) of exercising brute physical force against people through, say, a police force, but in general, the application of physical force against bodies is not necessary because the subject subjugated to political power estimates the political power as a superior power and submits to it, i.e. in this estimation there is an act of legitimation of and submission to the superior political power. Only through this act of submissive estimation is the superior political power able to issue commands that will be obeyed without the need to use physical force.184

By the same token, any holder of political office only ever has the back-up of the option of physical force insofar as the public forces such as the police and the army in turn estimate and esteem the political leaders and their political apparatus and officers as a legitimate, superior, political power and submit to them in obedience. Political power is therefore essentially, inherently based originarily on estimation in which subjects estimate another, usually an officeholder in the structured hierarchy of the polity, whether it be based on a written constitution or not, as superior.185 Just as trust (a concept that only makes sense in considering the power interplay between free human beings) is essential to the interchanges of civil society, and is itself a mutually estimating interplay, estimation of a political instance as superior is essential to the life of a polity and constitutes the core of its legitimacy.186 A political instance such as a court, estimates a citizen as answerable before the court, and conversely estimates the court itself as legitimate and submits to its summons. Political power sanctioned by the constitution is always estimated and submitted to, a people’s constitutional polity with its multiple interplays of estimation, legitimation and submission, being its historical second nature by virtue of its living-together.

Why is this interplay of legitimating estimation and submission essential for political power? Regarded as a social interplay among human beings, each of whom is a free starting-point (source of power, ἀρχή) of self-movement (i.e. an individual endowed with free, spontaneous will), whether this movement be in understanding or in practices, specifically political power can only be understood as the submission of one free source of power to another in estimating the other source of power as superior. The superiority consists in the superiority of the willed purposes posited by that superior ἀρχή, i.e. what the superior holder of political power posits as a purpose can — has the power to — assert itself vis-à-vis the inferior, subjugated subject, who estimates the superior ἀρχή and its purpose as legitimately superior and therefore obeys. The hierarchy of political power thus necessarily depends on acts of submissive estimation. Without this submissive act of estimation, power in the guise of superior physical, coercive force would have to be applied ubiquitously in which the superior political power proves at least its physical superiority through the exercise of brute physical force carried out by its agents who, in turn however, must recognize their superior as superior (perhaps for the sake of some advantage this superior provides, such as comparatively lucrative pay for the security forces). Such a state is a police state lacking in legitimacy, for the state may be feared by dint of its superior brute force, but it is not estimated highly. Even the exercise of superior physical force cannot force the act of submission and estimation by the inferior subject (as evidenced by the phenomenon of political dissidence ubiquitously practised in the name of freedom). At most it can only physically restrain, confiscate, threaten physical violence, incarcerate, etc.187

The act of estimation is a kind of interchange (cf. Chapter 5.6) in which the superior individual sees itself mirrored in the other’s comportment in an act of submission as superior, and the inferior individual sees itself mirrored in the comportment of the superior individual as an inferior individual who will submit to and obey commands, and is, perhaps, under the superior’s protection. The power game is apparent in the reciprocal mirroring, that is, in the reflective interplay of mutual estimation in which rituals of submission are paramount. Therefore there can be no political power without this reciprocal mirroring as superior who and inferior who, even though the act of legitimating estimation may be feigned, i.e. a false semblance effected by the presentation of false masks of self-comportment, and it may be grudging. If the estimation of the superior instance as superior is freely given, it is legitimized.

The one holding political power is literally the governor who governs the subject by imposing its will on the governed subject (a will usually, but not always, formulated within the framework of the rule of law, at least in modern democracies, but possibly also the capricious will of a despot). The holder of political office is a governing origin for bringing about a change in another, namely, the politically governed subject, through an imposition of will. The political subject, in recognizing, grudgingly or otherwise, the one holding political power as superior, obeys the command of the ‘governor’. Imposition and obedience are therefore always already an interplay, and never one-sided. The relation between governor and governed, once constituted more or less permanently, is one-sided, unidirectional in the sense that the governor is the starting-point who governs the other through an imposition of will by command, whether it be a direct, specific command, or the indirect command by promulgated laws that prescribe rules of conduct, often negatively in the form of prohibitions, or indirect commands in the form of regulations issued by authorities under the control of the governor or government (which is itself an hierarchically organized, collective governor with a president, prime minister, premier or similar at its head). The change (μεταβολή) is brought about one-sidedly in the other by the one governing. But this one-sidedness of having the power to issue commands that will be obeyed, i.e. the one-sidedness of being able to bring forth a change in another, inferior individual, is itself embedded in a deeper-lying two-sided or reciprocal act of estimatioin in which the respective superior and inferior statuses of the two individuals are acknowledged and thus established in the first place. Because the necessary estimation which forms the basis of the political power play is invariably overlooked, political power can seem to be simply a ‘technical’ relation of one-sided governing of changes (viz. performed, obedient behaviour) in the political subject. But the political subject is itself irrevocably an ἀρχή, a free, spontaneous will, who must renounce its individual will and power to determine its own movements, and sight must not be lost of this if socio-ontological insight is to be gained.

The governor’s imposition of will through commanding the governed subject in some way (e.g. a magistrate sentencing an offender to some punishment or other or, more mediatedly, a parliament promulgating a law) has to be distinguished from a technical relationship such as a doctor treating a patient, because τέχνη ποιητική — which, like political power, is indeed an ἀρχή, i.e. an origin having dominion over change in something else, namely the patient’s body — is based on knowing how to bring about an envisaged change without one (superior) will being imposed on another (inferior) will. A carpenter, for instance, knows how to transform wood into a table, but the wood that is thus transformed has no will of its own. The phenomenon of a physician treating a patient is situated between purely technical manipulation of things and the exercise of political power because the patient is a human being endowed with free will who acknowledges the physician as superior only with respect to the medical know-how that will hopefully bring about a cure. The patient concurs to being treated by the physician for the sake of a purpose which the patient has set for him or herself, namely, to be cured. Without the patient’s permission, the physician can do nothing. Insofar, the physician treating the patient is the patient’s agent, acting at the patient’s behest as a service-provider, and the patient’s will and purpose remain the point of origin and thus ultimately superior, even though the physician has superior knowledge with regard to how to cure sick people. There is no imposition of a superior will when the physician manipulates the patient’s body or prescribes how the patient should behave to get well.

The relationship between physician and patient is that of an interchange between free sources of power in the sense that there is an agreement between the two for the physician to render a service, and not a relationship of one-sided social power between a superior source of power and a submissive one, despite the physician’s superior know-how (which may be factually intimidating for the patient — but this is another facet of who-interplay). The patient obeys the physician not by dint of the physician’s superior political power (in holding some political office or other), but by dint of the physician’s superior knowledge which the sick patient ultimately wills and wants to have applied to him or herself. The patient can even refuse treatment by the physician. This shows that the patient remains the starting-point for what happens in the treatment, including even the termination of treatment. The patient remains in control, a point of origin, and does not submit to the doctor as a superior, governing source of power. The patient’s obedience to the ‘doctor’s orders’ is still relative to the patient’s having ultimate control over being treated by the doctor (assuming that the patient is, say, not mentally ill and has lost the ability to be responsible for him or herself, or is unduly intimidated by the doctor’s superior social status, etc.).

10.2Two related social powers: Rhetoric and the political power of government – Legitimacy, punishment, terror

The essential difference between a social relation of power and a technical relation of power over things (or humans qua things), as we have seen, is that power over other human beings as free ἀρχαί always involves, of its essence, their willing or unwilling submission, i.e. an ontologically prior interchange of estimation with the ruler in which the ruler is acknowledged as a superior power to be obeyed. The priority here is not a temporal one but a priority in the order of thinking-through that reveals the ontological structure of the world. Willing submission may be either a renunciation of responsibility for shaping one’s own existence, thus disburdening oneself of the care for one’s own existence, or it may be in exchange for something else, such as money or protection, or it may be the estimation that the ruler or leader has a superior understanding for shaping a shared existence on the basis of the association. In the latter case, one could speak of a legitimate sociation through political power, accepted and affirmed by those being led and ruled. Unwilling submission may be coerced through the use of violent force or the threat thereof. Such submission under duress is the hallmark of illegitimate political power.

As has been shown, sociation through political power has to be distinguished not only from the technical power to transform things (the know-how of τέχνη ποιητική), but also from sociation through mutually estimating interchange in which humans freely give and take goods in the broadest sense, including the exchange of commodity goods, services, honour and prestige, esteem, gifts, views, opinions, pleasantries, kindnesses, insults, glances, etc. (as investigated in Chapter 5.6). Such a free give-and-take is not based on power in which one is ruled by the other, but on the equality of the exchangers in a power play,190 even when a wealthy individual ‘buys’ others to do his or her bidding (thus exercising a kind of venal power over others, i.e. a social power mediated by the power of money). But sociation through political power must proceed from an act of estimation in which the ruled submit, i.e. renounce their status as being free, unrestricted ἀρχαί, free points of emanation of their own self-movement for the sake of some good (which may be simply the absence of a bad).

As announced in the previous section, there is a further art investigated by Aristotle at the founding moment of Western metaphysics which does not fit the paradigm of know-how as a starting-point for governing change in things considered merely as physically manipulable. This art is the art of rhetoric which is the know-how of persuasion, i.e. the art of knowing how to bring an audience around to a given point of view aligned with what the orator is aiming at. The change which the art of rhetoric aims at is engendering and winning trust and confidence on the way to bringing about a change of viewpoint on the part of the audience (those who hear), a change in how they hold the world or a particular aspect or situation in the world to be, often with a view to their action, and this change is to be brought about by (verbal, rhetorical) means of persuasion, i.e. of persuasive speech, and the movement itself is persuasion, and what is changed is how the world is held to be on the part of an audience in a certain aspect and a certain situation. Such a change ostensibly governed by the orator (e.g. a salesperson’s pitch ending with the customer’s decision to buy, thus ‘clinching the deal’, or a politician’s speech that attains the end of convincing the listeners to vote for him/her) is not a merely real change in a thing, i.e. in a being regarded simply as a thing in the third person, but a change in a being or beings addressed in the second person who, as outlined in previous chapters, has that openness to 3D-time that can be called a psyche and mind.

Such addressing presupposes that the ones addressed are themselves open to the world in its disclosive truth (such disclosure happening through undistorted presencing and absencing in the 3D-temporal clearing) and that they hold the world to be in a certain way, which is their opinion (Dafürhalten, δόξα), and that the way they hold the world to be is articulable in language and therefore also open to the flux of communication and argument in speech, in language which they can hear and understand. Such second person beings are human beings, i.e. beings themselves exposed to the open time-clearing who understand the world in a certain way and are receptive to it. The change which the art of rhetoric aims at has to be regarded as a change in how the world reveals itself to an audience and not merely as a real (or ‘thingly’) change in things.

The words spoken by the orator — what is said in the rhetorical arguments aimed at entering the hearts and minds, i.e. ψυχή καὶ νοῦς, of the listeners, and how they are spoken (their moodful intonation, the way the speech is ‘delivered’ to its auditors) — are supposed to woo the audience over to another viewpoint favourable to the orator’s intentions and interests. The audience can also be persuaded especially by the status of who is speaking, i.e. by the orator’s authority, status, reputation and charisma, as who he shows himself to be in how he presents himself in the comportment-masks (cf. Chapter 5.6) of his speech as well as the aura of his charisma and reputation.191 Charisma is the aura emanating from somewho’s physical presence, whereas reputation is how a person is held to be by what is said generally about who this person is in his or her physical-sensuous absencing, which consists of a general opinion about the person’s goodness, where goodness is not understood in the moral sense, but in the sense of whether this person is good for anything (e.g. competent, an expert in a field relevant to what is spoken about, reliable, trustworthy, etc.), or good for nothing.

The who-status of who is speaking is a powerful ‘argument’ in itself, and who-status in itself, independently of any overtly rhetorical situation in which words are spoken, must be considered as an aspect of social power in the basic and very simple sense that an individual will show itself off as somewho or other in order to make an impression on others. Making an impression on others, albeit diffusely, is a kind of change (μεταβολή) brought about in others (in their perceptions) and therefore fits, at least from one side, the ontological structure of δύναμις, of power, as laid out by Aristotle in the Metaphysics. Making an impression can be simply the beauty a woman puts on display to affect her public, or the clothes a man or woman wears in order to create a certain impression of wealth, stylishness, social stratum, up-to-dateness, hipness, conservative solidity, or whatever. Fame and renown have the social power aspect that the mere physical-sensuous presence of a famous person, a celebrity, statesman or who-have-you, is sufficient to make waves in an audience. The who-status of fame is in itself a social power in the power play of estimation.

It must not be overlooked, however, that the social power exercised by showing oneself off in one’s who-status in a certain way to make an impression is always a two-way, reciprocating situation in which an audience has to estimate and acknowledge and be receptive for the display and showing-off of who-status. The change wrought in making an impression on others is therefore in truth always and essentially an estimating interchange that depends on the audience’s active receptiveness. Even the simple physical presence of beauty, for instance, can fail to make an impression if the audience cannot properly read that beauty, so that beauty as a social power can only be exercised within a definite socially established, customary understanding of what constitutes beauty in any given time and with an audience that can ‘see’ and estimate such culturally cultivated beauty. Making an impression on others by the way one shows oneself off as who one is, is inchoate compared to the explicit exercise of social power in being able to command others. It is a more subtle, implicit sort of social power that may attempt and expect to get others to behave in a certain way, but may just as easily exhaust itself in simply quietly enjoying the feeling of power in the mirrored estimation of one’s impress-ive presence by others.

In listening to rhetorical arguments which aim at entering the heart, mind and soul in order to engender trust and bring the listener or listeners around to another viewpoint in swinging their mood, by gaining their confidence, it is the audience’s soul as a whole that is aimed at, i.e. its openness to the 3D-time-clearing in which the world shows itself either as it is or as it is not within a given hermeneutic cast of an age, and is grasped thus by understanding. The limitations of the social power of rhetoric thus lie within the nature of the human soul, which is the unique mode of being of human being itself. The limitations of the power of rhetoric therefore lie ultimately in human being itself as ex-sistent exposure to the open clearing of 3D-time, which cannot be manipulated like a builder may manipulate a beam or a doctor a dislocated shoulder. By virtue of this exposure to the temporal clearing, human beings are free ἀρχαί of their own self-movement. The limitations are therefore ontological in nature, not merely ontic or physically ‘real’.

There is no precalculable certainty with which a listener or an audience can be swayed in its mood and brought around to a given point of view through the employment of words for, how auditors see and understand the world lies at the core of the freedom of human being itself. The manipulability of an audience has its limits in the audience’s very otherness as free, which is an ontological otherness that essentially remains untouched by ontic manipulation and effect (such as the collision between physical bodies), despite all attempts to influence its mood. The words employed by a skilled speaker are not like the hammer employed by a builder in effecting real changes to nail and timber as things. Rather, they speak to the other revealingly or concealingly or distortingly and call a state of affairs to presence within the other’s world and from within a certain mood and ontological preconceptions. To win over an audience, to bring someone around by talking, to gain the trust of another person, depends on the other giving the speaker its trust and confidence, and this can be freely refused.

Thus we can see that the rhetorical situation is not and can never be one-sided, but is always a mutually estimating exchange, an interchange, an interplay of powers (cf. Chapter 5.6), even when only one person is doing the talking. The act of persuasion depends essentially also on a reciprocation in the listener or listeners giving the speaker their trust and confidence. This reciprocation, as has been shown, is a kind of estimation and mirroring, which underlies all interchange between human beings in their ineluctable casting as somewho or other.192

Does the phenomenon of political power, as Aristotle suggests (cf. above Met. Delta 1 1013a10), have the ontological structure of a pro-ductive δύναμις in that the one wielding power, the ruler or governor or government, is the starting-point governing a change in the other, i.e. the ruled or governed, in the sense that the ruled obey the ruler’s commands under pain of punishment? We have already seen that this is not the case because obedience presupposes submission, which is a kind of estimation accorded by the governed. The terms ruler/ruled or government/ governed are employed here for convenience only, on a general level of consideration of the phenomenon of political social power pertaining to how a polity is structured according to power plays, and could be substituted by sovereign/subject, governor/ governed, magistrate/accused, commander/commanded, but not the social power of master/servant, superior/subordinate or employer/employee, etc. mediated by reified value. Sociation through political power involves a government and the governed, commands and obedience to commands. Political power is the power to get somebody else to do something or refrain from doing something in line with a ruler’s will. This obedient action in response to a ruler’s command constitutes the change (μεταβολή) that is brought about in the other being, the one ruled, analogously (but by no means identical) to the case of the art of rhetoric, in which the change brought about is a change of viewpoint on the part of the audience. In both cases, it is words, speech which apparently effect the change, the words of command, on the one hand, and the persuasive words of rhetorical argument, on the other. The change wrought in each case is active obedience itself or a change of viewpoint and in both cases depends upon a receptiveness — of ‘hearingness’ in the former case and listening in the latter.

Words do not and cannot ‘effect’ a change in a free human being. They are not ‘effective’, ‘actuating’; they are heard. Obedience to a command is literally a ‘hearingness’, deriving from Latin ‘ob-’ ‘toward’ and ‘audire’ ‘to hear’ or ‘oboedire’(L. ‘to give ear, hearken, obey’), which presupposes that the commanded subject hearkens and gives ear, just an audience gives ear to and allows itself to be swayed by an orator. Hence there is an essential ontological link between political social power and the social power of rhetoric which is also manifest in the ubiquitous rhetoric of political power. This giving of ear is already an estimation of the ruler or governor or commander as such. The willingness to obey is the governed subject’s free decision and amounts to a submission on the part of the governed subject itself of its own will in favour of the ruler’s will.

And what if the governed subject does not give ear to the ruler’s command, e.g. what if it does not obey the laws promulgated by the government? Such disobedience can go so far as that of a political dissident who questions the government’s very legitimacy and not merely one of its actions. Then it must be punished, perhaps even for sedition. Punishment can take the form of physical harm to the subject or those close to it, the restriction of the subject’s freedom of physical movement by imprisonment, the total or partial loss of the subject’s property (e.g. a parking fine or confiscation of assets). Even punishment cannot force obedience, for the act of giving ear is a free one by a free ἀρχή. Under pain of punishment, however, this free ἀρχή may acquiesce grudgingly to comply. Apart from any consideration of due process of law, which is here put to one side, a subject that does not obey its government’s commands in the form of law, etc. must be punished, and this punishment must be carried out by the government’s agents (bailiffs, police force, prison officers, etc.) entrusted with the task of punishing offenders. The agents of punishment, in turn, must obey the commands to carry out a punishment, and this presupposes that these agents estimate appropriately the hierarchical power structures in which they are embedded and perform their duty.

This estimation can be given, on the one hand, because the government’s agents estimate the government as legitimate and understand themselves as loyal government officers, or on the other hand, they may estimate the chain of command from the government down for fear of punishment themselves if they do not properly carry out orders. There is thus a kind of regressive alternating chain of legitimacy and punishment that must underlie any form of politically sociating power in a community or society. In this chain, the alternating links have a different ontological status because legitimacy is an act of human freedom and punishment is ultimately an act of physical force and coercion directed at things and human bodies. Both work in tandem. Physical force and violence can confiscate, restrain, kill and maim, banish, incarcerate, intimidate, but it cannot force anyone to esteem a government as legitimate. Any individual as free principal is (ontologically, i.e. by virtue of exposure to the clearing of 3D-time) beyond the reach of the power of physical force emanating from another principal, in this case, the hierarchical organization of a state’s repressive apparatus.

Furthermore, a government that relies primarily on a system of punishment carried out by its agents to enforce its will whilst not being estimated as legitimate by large parts of the citizenry must be a system of terror with a nested organizational system of agents of physical force who themselves fear punishment by other sections of the repressive apparatus if they do not efficiently carry out orders. (For instance, the secret police oversees the police.) The tyrant who rules through an organized system of terror (consisting of arbitrary punishment and also arbitrary rewards) must himself even fear being killed because the legitimacy of a government can only be given by a people that is not in constant fear of being subject to arbitrary, violent, physical force exercised by the tyrant’s agents. Friedrich A. Hayek points out the crucial importance of legitimizing opinion among the people even for a tyrannical system of government:

As dictators themselves have known best at all times, even the most powerful dictatorship crumbles if the support of opinion is withdrawn. This is the reason why dictators are so concerned to manipulate opinion through that control of information which is in their power.193

A system of sociating political power plays constituting the government of a society can only be regarded as free insofar as the citizens of that society freely, willingly estimate, through their own judgement, the government as legitimate. Kant puts it thus:

Vielmehr ist meine äußere (rechtliche) Freiheit so zu erklären: sie ist die Befugnis, keinen äußeren Gesetzen zu gehorchen, als zu denen ich meine Beistimmung habe geben können.

Kant Zum ewigen Frieden 1983 S. 204

Rather, my outward (rightful) freedom is to be declared as follows: it is the authority not to obey any outer laws other than those to which I have been able to give my assent.

This implies that the citizens then freely submit to the government’s superior power and obey its laws and other decrees, edicts and regulations that shape how the citizens are to conduct themselves in social intercourse with each other and with the state itself. The exercise of political power is then not based largely on the threat of punishment, and even offenders who infringe the law accept their punishment as legitimate (presuming due process of law, which is an essential part of demonstrating the law’s legitimacy and consists largely in acknowledging the accused as free and equal before the law). The ‘hardened criminals’ in society, who do not esteem any political power as legitimate and have to be restrained by physical force, remain a small minority, and the free citizens legitimize the regime only because they reconcile the existence of a superior, governing instance in some way or other with their own individual freedom exercised in manifold power plays in civil society.

A government also gains legitimacy through rhetorical means in the broadest sense insofar as it wins the ‘hearts and minds’ of its citizens, who signal that they have been won over by estimating the government as legitimate in their own minds. Political power therefore intermeshes with both rhetorical power (e.g. attempts on the part of the government to win the people over to a certain policy) and physical social force (the state’s so-called repressive apparatuses, as last resort, in particular, to maintain the polity as the play of political powers that it is). Only the last form of social power is pro-ductive power at all in the sense investigated in the metaphysical tradition as a point of emanation governing changes in something else (the offender’s body, property,...), and even this point of emanation, a physically repressive force (such as a police force) is, in turn, organized internally as a hierarchy of command and obedience that is a political power play based on estimation of superiors by subordinate officers who are and understand themselves as dutiful servants of the state.

Furthermore, the offender as a human being can resist the attempt to restrain and subdue him physically, and may not simply submit to the state’s agents of repression. Such an act of submission, in turn, is, as we have already seen, a free act of estimation beyond the reach of any physical force (even physical torture). Thus all forms of social power are structured ontologically as an estimating interchange between free principals. This is because all sociating power plays between human beings without exception involve some form of mutual estimation, no matter how deficient. In the case of specifically political power, the governed subjects estimate the superior powers as such, give ear and obey. Within the recognition of a government as legitimate, the government can indeed give commands (above all in the form of laws) that will be obeyed.

10.3Legitimacy of government further considered – Acceptance and affirmation of government

In the case of legitimate government, as opposed to a tyranny based on a system of state terror, the subjects accept and assent or at least acquiesce to being governed by their government which has legitimate authority to do so in their eyes and for the sake of some good which could be formulated generally as enabling and protecting the citizens’ customary way of life. Where a ruler rules or a government governs not solely by virtue of the threat of punishment (which is always ultimately physical force and violence), it rules by virtue of the acknowledged legitimacy of its rule, i.e. because its subjects are willing to obey its commands, i.e. its laws, displaying even reverence for, say, a country’s monarch or its constitution. Insofar as a subject is willing to obey, paradoxically, the use of physical force and coercion is unnecessary. One could even say that the ultimate basis of government is not, as a Leninist would say, ‘organized state violence’: even if the society in question is ruled tightly and repressively by a tyrannical system of terror, physical force is not an ultimate means but can only be exercised by the government’s agents because the government is estimated in some way as legitimate by the population at large which, say, may consent to being governed by a ‘strong hand’ for the sake of security and law & order or certain welfare benefits such as cheap housing. Legitimacy given by free consent thus becomes, and must become, the ultimate ground of government, not the threat of physical force and violence, since all social power, including political social power, is a mutual estimating.

Legitimacy here is understood not as a synonym for legality in the sense of “conformable to law or rule; sanctioned or authorized by law” (OED), if law is taken to mean law promulgated by a legislature as written law, for this would be a formal conception of legitimacy as conformity merely to positive right, i.e. to right posited by the state in the form, the ‘look’ of law. Rather, legitimacy in the present context means conformity to law in the sense of natural right, which is ontologically prior to merely state-posited right. Natural right is ‘natural’ in the sense of being a state of affairs, a polity that is in-joint and conformable with ‘human nature’, i.e. with an historically cast essence of human being that is lived and practised ethically-habitually in the framework of certain shared usages or, in other words, with Greek νόμος. Legitimacy depends essentially on the insight of understanding into such conformity with νόμος, i.e. on the insight that how society is set up as a polity is in conformity with what is good and necessary for human beings living together in society in an historically rooted, customary way of living that at the same time engenders and preserves human freedom.