10.7Ontological powerlessness of the metaphysical, productive conception of power – The ultimate impotence of both political power and rhetoric – Ineluctably sharing an hermeneutic cast of the truth of beings in an historical age – Embeddedness of individual truth in a shared, historically cast truth – The Geist-Zeit and the enpropriation of human being to the clearing of 3D-time – Powerlessly free, mutually estimating power interplay, pluralism and benign indifference – Fairness as the ethereal ethos of a free society

Is the powerlessness of rhetoric as a technique for bringing the other around through talking, a powerlessness arising in the face of the ontological otherness of the other with whom there must be interchange and some sort of process of mutual estimation — as sketched above in section 10.2 and in more depth elsewhere209 —, itself related in essence to the powerlessness of being itself as the temporal openness for presencing and absencing? That is to say, is it not the case that the other human being as an other individual site for the openness to being is beyond the reach of any technically conceived productive power and machination? Does the merging of the openness of being in its temporality as shared individually by each and every human being require an essentially different approach to the question of specifically social and political power? Does the question concerning the possibility of constituting a We at all (cf. Chapter 11) have to be posed anew from a perspective that has clearly taken leave of the traditional, one-sided, mono-archic metaphysical, productive conception of power? Within such a conception of power, a social power such as rhetoric is regarded as a technique that (mis)understands its powerlessness over the other as merely an impotence that could be overcome through improvements in technique, and not as an ontological powerlessness that resides ultimately in one origin of free movement encountering another origin of free movement, both of whom are free only because of their exposure of mind and psyche to the 3D-time-clearing.

As Heidegger points out, powerlessness has to be distinguished from impotence. Powerlessness is situated outside the dimension of power altogether, whereas impotence is a lack, a deficiency of power. “Power-lessness is not impotence that, lacking power and having to do without it, still remains related precisely to power.” (Das Macht-lose ist nicht das Ohn-mächtige, das immer noch und gerade auf Macht — sie entbehrend und sie missend — bezogen bleibt. Besinnung GA66:188) Even when an other human being is coerced through (the threat of) the use of physical force to obey a command, such subjugation under duress does not impinge upon the other’s freedom, which, as has been shown, remains in essence untouched by such subjugation. Such subjugation through the use of physical force or its threatened use is based on force directed physically, i.e. ontically, against the other’s body or property or the bodies of persons close and dear to the other. The other’s body or the other’s property can be physically restrained or maimed or confiscated or injured and damaged, or even destroyed by a superior force, but the other as another human being is situated ontologically in a temporal clearing altogether outside the realm of exercise of such violent power which is thus altogether powerless, and not merely impotent, in this respect. Why is this? Because the other as another human being is an individual site within the clearing for being with its own perspective on the disclosure of beings in the temporal clearing.

How the other holds the world to be in the openness of the clearing for being’s truth is essentially individual and therefore untouchable by means of violent force. Holding the world to be within the open clearing for being’s disclosure and concealment is constitutive of human freedom, which is always essentially and ultimately individual freedom, even when practical consensus has been attained through some kind of deliberation, or certain truths, as we shall see below, are necessarily shared, ‘common property’ in any given epoch. The truth of being is situated outside the reach and scope of any possible one-sided exercise of political or other social power, which is directed at another being, but not another being in its being. Strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as a one-sided exercise of political or other social power for, as has been shown in detail, all social power is a mutually estimating power interplay, and such estimating remains always a matter of individual opinion, i.e. an individual way of holding the other to be and estimating who she or he is.

That is why the means of rhetorical power are primarily words, and these means come up against and are faced with the essential limit of the other’s very being in its freedom, i.e. of the other human being’s essential individuated situatedness within the openness of being in its truth and its corresponding practical self-movement within this openness emanating from it as a point of origin. All the means and techniques of rhetorical persuasion, no matter whether they reside in the arguments presented to enter and sway the heart and soul of the audience, or in the reputation and charisma of who is speaking and how the speaker projects his character and who-standing to the audience, or in the way in which the arguments are delivered through the tone, inflection and drama of the voice, have to win the confidence and trust of the audience and somehow mesh with its worldview to have their effect. Such winning of confidence and trust is thus always essentially a free reciprocation that depends on the willingness of the audience to go along with the speaker in an implicit exchange of views on how the issue at hand is to be seen. An audience cannot be simply rhetorically manipulated (passively), but must allow itself to be so, especially by (freely) allowing itself to be swayed hither and thither by cleverly manipulated moods (e.g. fashion in advertising, or fear in political campaigns).

As has been presupposed throughout this inquiry, from Heidegger we can learn that being and the truth of being needs human being as the open site for truth, as the Da. In thinking on further from Heidegger we have brought to light that the Da, in turn, is identical with the clearing of 3D-time for presencing and absencing of ‘occurrents’ whether they be whats or whos. Being and human being belong to each other in the open temporal clearing. That is Ereignis or propriation, and such belonging is at the same time the groundless exposure of humans to freedom of thought, whereas freedom of action depends on outcomes of mutually estimating power interplays. Only through being and human being belonging to each other does world open and beings as a whole and as such, both as what they are and as who they are, come to show their multifaceted faces to human being in some hermeneutic casting or other. But the clearing for the truth of being is occupied existentially by human being individually; each human being ineluctably partakes individually of the open clearing of the truth of beings in their beingness so that the constitution of a We has to be approached as an explicit philosophical problem of how the truth of being, in its singularity, particularity and universality, comes to be shared. A We is not merely a bunch of individual humans taken collectively.

At the same time, each individual participation of human being in the truth of being is also essentially shared; in being human beings, we essentially and necessarily share the openness of being in its temporality with other human beings. No individual is able to ‘make up’ its own world entirely in how it discloses itself. Moreover, each individual world only ever opens also through others’ opening to the world. Each individual experience of world is mediated essentially also through the experience of others, i.e. world opens for each of us also through the mediation of other human beings in their own openness to being from whom we learn in countless ways, be it through communication or simply by adopting others’ views or practically imitating. Thus, traditions, which are always also ways of understanding the world, are handed down. This means that each individual truth, each individual point of view is mediated by practically sharing a life-world with others through education.

But even more deeply than that, i.e. ontologically: Each individual truth is also a shared truth with others within a shared historical world that has a given, universal cast, i.e. an hermeneutic cast of mind in a given age. No matter what differences in individual, singular views exist, these differing individual views and how each individual holds the world to be (Dafürhalten) are all situated and are mediated with one another within a shared, universal-historical world in the 3D-time-clearing with its fundamentally shared understanding of that world in the basic ontological outlines and building blocks for its truth that define in advance or apriori what the truth of beings as such can be in that historical time. The historical opening of world in how it shapes up in a given, universal hermeneutic cast is ontologically prior to the individual or any collectivity of human beings, and is an ‘always already’, ineluctably universal given whose givenness is only co-shaped and co-moulded by those rare, exceptional ones who find themselves called to the abyssal task of co-casting an historical world. The ‘always already’ only becomes malleable and revisable in a creative re-casting that must first dare to question. At first and for the most part, the truth of an historical world is simply given and shared — unquestioningly — thus forming the basis within which innumerable differences arise in all sorts of configurations of mutually estimating power interplays.

The universality of an hermeneutic ontological casting of an age may well be shared with another one. In our own age this is the case, for instance, with the overlapping of a modern scientific cast of world with a Christian one with all the incoherence and inconsistency this often brings with it.

Nevertheless, a shared historical truth of the world in all its particularity (specific areas of what is understandable and knowable in the world) has to be appropriated individually. There is thus an essential embeddedness of individual (singular) truth in a shared (universal, historical) truth of being which provides the basic casting for all particular truths. The clearing for being’s truth, although ineluctably individually, mortally and therefore also finitely ek-sisted, is essentially also ineluctably shared with the other in the other’s exposure to the same temporal clearing in which a given, historical, universal cast has taken shape. An individual opening of world in all its singular idiosyncrasy and particularity is willy-nilly a shared opening of world mediated not only by the countless others, near and far, intimately close and anonymously average, present and past, together with whom we are cast into and share an historical world, but also by the mind of the time, i.e. the Geist-Zeit, as a universal casting of historical world that confronts humankind, unquestioned and seemingly unquestionable, like an uncanny destiny which, however, is experienced simply as self-evidence and obviousness. How an individual understands and holds the world to be is always a configuration, perhaps singular, unique and quirky one, of ontological building blocks provided by an historical epoch. Radical singularity only comes about when an individual questions the very self-evidence of a given hermeneutic cast of world, thus breaking with all possible configurations.

Sharing an understanding of world with other human beings takes place primarily through language (leaving aside the powerful possibility of imitating through which, especially when young and not yet our selves, we appropriate others’ understanding and way of being in the world in a kind of one-sided mirror-game with ‘identification figures’). The other’s world is evoked, called to presence primarily through language. But even more than that: Insofar as the stillness of the being’s truth in the temporal clearing of an age makes its way to human language, an historical world opens up and takes shape in language’s casting definition, which can be shared among humans through this language, albeit always accompanied by a mood of the time that makes its way to music.210 The casting of an historical world is a shared epochal human project in which individuals participate not only through listening to each other in dialogue, but also by listening and being open to the hitherto unheard-of, silent sendings from the temporal clearing with messages about how the beingness of beings can be recast through fundamental ontological concepts that as ontological remain hidden to those living in a given age. Nevertheless, we can listen to each other both preontologically and ontologicaly because human being itself is first and foremost openness and exposure and a belonging to the temporal openness for the truth of being in its stillness from which an historical world emerges and assumes shape and within which it can even change how it shapes up epochally in historical time.

The enpropriation of human being to where it belongs, namely, in the clearing of 3D-time, from which beings as such emerge in their ontologically defined outlines, is powerless. It is ‘only’ a possibility that cannot be denied or refused, since we are powerless to refuse, knowingly or unknowingly, our enpropriation to being or how an historical world shows up and shapes up for our understanding. It is the possibility of all human possibilities to gain such insight. The eyes of understanding cannot banish an insight once they have caught a glimpse of it. There is no power which can either coerce or prevent such knowing belonging, just as there is no power which can either coerce or prevent the oblivion to such belonging to the truth of being. Ultimately, each individual must decide for him- or herself.

One specific powerless possibility for a shared historical truth that breaks the mould and initiates a hermeneutic recasting is to come to conceive social and political power differently from how it has hitherto been conceived, mostly implicitly, throughout the history of metaphysics. As has been shown in previous chapters (Chapter 5.3, 5.4, 5.6, Chapter 9.2, Chapter 10.1, 10.2), the phenomena of human beings sharing the world in mutually estimating interchange with each other point to the limits of mono-archically conceived productionist, metaphysical power, for metaphysically conceived, productive power is always thought as a starting-point residing in one being governing a change, a μεταβολή in another being. Monotheism, in particular, thinks within this monoarchic paradigm by positing the ἀρχή as a supreme being, but also all onto-theological thinking that posits some kind (look) of first principle, such as a will to live, as an anchor.

In questioning powerlessly, we have asked: Does not the reciprocity of the free, mutually estimating exchange and interchange (μεταβολή in its other sense) between and among human beings, even today, still await its appropriate conceptualization, no longer subsumed (implicitly) under key metaphysical concepts from δύναμις and ἐνέργεια through to Nietzschean will to power in which power is always thought mono-archically? By virtue of the ontological peculiarity of human beings as ineluctably free beings cast individually and singularly out into an historically shared, universal, temporally open truth of being in its beingness, all interchange among them is a who-power-play that, paradoxically, is situated essentially outside the reach of any metaphysically conceived power and therefore within a realm of powerlessness. In particular, there is no metaphysically conceived power capable of achieving a lasting unity of truth (e.g. a theocracy) or even practical agreement among a plurality of individual emanations of freedom; any unity is a unity on recall, until the next outbreak of dissent and conflict. The yearning for the one (τὸ ἕν) must give way to acceptance of the many (τὰ πολλά) whereby such acceptance of difference, paradoxically, is a kind of unity.

A free society sociated via mutually estimating power play is necessarily pluralist, for there can be no unified truth for a way of living in it, but only a plurality of different ways of living mediated with one another by sociating interchanges in the medium of abstract, reified value that leave each other in peace, and indeed, in a guaranteed, but benevolent indifference to each other. The preservation of freedom demands conceding the powerlessness of government to bring about certain envisaged outcomes of the power interplay at the heart of social living.

The mutually estimating power plays among individuals and associations therefore contains many contradictory possibilities, including the following: rivalry and teamwork, competition and co-operation, appreciation and depreciation of abilities, vanity and self-esteem, flattery and esteem, winning and losing, greed and moderation, mutual benefit and one-sided advantage, uplifting exhilaration and downcasting disappointment. The power interplay cannot be governed, controlled to produce certain desirable outcomes rather than others, nor can it be quelled to prevent the savage struggle over who-status among the players (over standing presence in the mirroring shine of public or private estimation) that rages everywhere and everyday, mostly covertly.

Political power is not cybernetic, but can only arbitrate conflicts and right wrong through a judiciary and seek to maintain fair boundary conditions of the game as a whole. Fairness cannot be calculably set up. When the power play among individuals and their associations is fair, it is beautiful like a fleeting, mild summer’s day, but, more often than not, it is unfair and ugly. The government is only one instance mandated to fight for fairness by laying down rules of play. Fairness, however, is not so much a matter of implementable government policy; rather fair play is a shared ethos in which the players are immersed that imbues the power interplay with a certain attunement. An ethos is an aether which the players breathe habitually like a fairer, higher atmosphere; it is not a higher power.