11.4How do we ourselves come about? – Belonging together in a situation

Die Persönlichkeit ist verändert, man kann fast sagen, unter der Haut gegen eine weniger eigentümliche umgetauscht: an die Stelle des Ich ist der erste, deutlich als unbehaglich und eine Verminderung empfundene, aber doch unwiderstehliche Ansatz eines Wir getreten.

Robert Musil

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften II Tl. 3 Kap. 8

The personality has changed; one can almost say, subcutaneously swapped for a less singular personality: in place of I, the first germ of a We has stepped, clearly felt as uncomfortable and as a diminishment, but nevertheless irresistible.

How is a We constituted? How do we ourselves come about? Heidegger says in the specific situation of his holding lectures before his students as the auditors of these lectures:

Wir, die wir in einem bestimmten Auftrage stehen, uns in einer besonderen Lage befinden. [...] Die Zusammengehörigkeit zur Vorlesung ist das Wesentliche, sie gründet sich auf das Mithören, auf die Einbezogenheit des einzelnen in die Hörerschaft. Dieses Ihr der Hörer gliedert sich in die Du, die als solche, aus solchem Verhältnis, angesprochen werden. (GA38:41)

We, we who stand in a certain task/mission, who find ourselves in a particular situation. [...] The belonging-together in the lecture course is what is essential; it is grounded in the listening-in, the listening-along-with, in the inclusion of the individual into the audience. This ‘you all’ of the auditors is articulated into the you’s who as such, out of such a relation, are addressed.

We are constituted as we in a “particular situation”, in “belonging-together” in a particular situation in which we “stand” in a “certain task/ mission”. “What is essential” for our constitution as we ourselves is this “belonging-together”, into which each individual one of us is integrated as part of a whole we. We gain our identity as we ourselves in this situated belonging-together. The audience, although articulated grammatically as a substantive, a noun, is only in the belonging-together in the particular situation. The audience is only in the “relation” (Verhältnis, πρός τι) of lecturer and students through the giving of the lecture and the listening by the auditor-students. It has no substance, no enduring, standing presence of its own. The ‘you all’ of the students vis-à-vis me as the lecturer is only in the belonging-together of you all, the individual students, in the situation. The we is thus situational presencing, not substantive οὐσία.

We arise only ephemerally in the conjunction of a situation that brings us together into an identity as we ourselves. The individuals, each of us, situated together in a “certain task” focused on a definite issue, are thus the ontic and ontological presupposition for constituting we ourselves. This shows that each of us as individual self has a certain ontological primacy in constituting ‘we ourselves’ as a certain kind of situational relationship. Whereas we ourselves are, i.e. presence, only in a situation in which we have taken on a certain task, I am myself in countless different situations with and without others. There is a certain continuity and permanence of I myself that endures through all the different situations in which I find myself — and find my self — as belonging together in one situational we or another. My finding myself in a certain situation is my Befindlichkeit, my particular situational mood. Sitting in the lecture theatre, I can be still in the mood of a situation now absent (a quarrel, perhaps) which, however, continues to presence as this absent, mooded situation, thus distracting me from my present situation. We ourselves, constituted as belonging together in the lectures’ audience, are borne by a mood of belonging together as we ourselves in our particular present shared situation and task. Our situation as we is passing, transient, whereas each of us is I myself in various situations, either on our own or in sharing particular we-constituting situations such as a football game in a stadium or on television, or a debate in an auditorium or in the letters to the editor of a newspaper. :

It should be noticed that with Heidegger (“Dieses Ihr”, “die Du”) there is a tendency to shift into the third person and substantivize in formulating philosophical concepts, in staking out, marking out and defining the phenomenon in the horizon, the ὁρισμός, of its concept. This tendency would seem to be inherent in the attempts hitherto to move back philosophically into the ontological grounds of the phenomena. Today we must be aware of this tendency of language and thinking, and counter it in our own thoughtful language in order to capture evocatively the fleeting presencing and absencing of the first-and-second person.

In the pages cited above from Heidegger’s lectures in Summer Semester 1934, he also goes through some of the possible deficiencies in the constitution of we ourselves that may consist of, say, those students who do not genuinely listen to the lectures and do not actively participate in learning (which in itself is already an indication of the fragmentedness of the we; those unfocused students are temporally absent in other situations that have been or might be), or the “certain number of countable exercise books” (bestimmte Anzahl zählbarer Hefte, GA38:42) that are administered by the university administration through which the we of the student audience is degraded into “certain numbers under the rubric of the professor’s lecture course” (bestimmte Nummern in der Rubrik der Vorlesung des Professors, GA38:43). Through this ontological degradation, the we of the lecture course becomes, vis-à-vis the university administration, not just a collective you of more or less anonymous ‘you students’, but a third person, even reified, merely quantitative collection of student enrolment numbers. The transformation into a third person collectivity is an ontological tendency of we ourselves through which we slip into substantial being as a substantivized entity, say, as ‘student enrolment numbers’. As student enrolment numbers, others now have a substantive linguistic ‘handle’ on us and we become manipulable in the third person under a label, and, in a further abstraction, even calculable as quantified entities devoid of quality, perhaps for the purposes of the university administration’s planning, or in social research.

To take another example of a privative form of ‘we ourselves’: Even the crowd that gathers after a car accident (bei einem Autounfall ansammelt, GA38:42) forms, according to Heidegger, a kind of diffuse, transient we-self who presences with the situation of the accident. Nevertheless, all the myriad possible deficient and privative forms of we ourselves are only possible within the all-encompassing ontological dimension of the first person plural, where the plurality here, as Heidegger points out, is not a mere number greater than one, but some kind of belonging-together in a definite situation, including even a diffuse or banal one.

The situation does not have to be a present one, presently presencing, but can just as well be one in which we have been, such as the heady times of an earlier decade that can still be recalled out of its absence to presencing in its very absence, along with the specific moodful ‘flavour’ of that time as evoked, for instance, by the music of that time. Or ‘we ourselves’ can be constituted in considering a future challenge, say, of coming to terms with oncoming technological change presencing from a still absent future. We ourselves can thus be constituted throughout the 3D-temporal clearing, even in a now absent ‘past’ or a still absent future in which each of us has not or will not individually participate, such as the commemoration of long ‘past’, but still presencing as now absent, momentous historical events.

11.5Constitution of an historical people – Heidegger’s authoritarian, anti-liberal casting of “we the people” – The historical decision to open up to the future – “We are the coming about of time itself”

... so erfuhr man auch, daß der Grad der wahren Originalität nicht im eitlen Besonderssein beschlossen liege, sondern durch das Sichöffnen entstehe, in steigende Grade des Teilnehmens und der Hingabe hinein, vielleicht bis zu dem höchsten Grad einer Gemeinschaft der ganz von der Welt aufgenommenen, vollendet Ichlosen, den man auf diese Weise zu erreichen vermöchte! ... Ulrich war ärgerlich über dieses abergläubische Geschwätz.

Robert Musil Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften I

Tl. 2 Kap. 113

... thus one also found out that the degree of true originality does not reside in vainly being special, but arises through opening oneself up, in increasing degrees of participation and surrender, perhaps to the highest degree which one could attain in this way, of a community of the completely egoless, wholly absorbed by the world! ... Ulrich was annoyed by this superstitious drivel.

If we ourselves only come about through a situation in which we belong together and thus constitute an identity of difference, when it comes to the constitution of an historical people as a kind of ‘we ourselves’ in our own selfhood, the situation in which this founding of identity takes place must be an historical situation, an historical moment that carries weight, a ‘casting-weight’. For this question we will continue to engage with Heidegger’s lectures of Summer Semester 1934 (GA38), taking note of the special historical moment in which Heidegger poses the question, “Who are we ourselves?” (Wer sind wir selbst? GA38:109) and answers “We are the people.” (Wir sind das Volk. GA38:109). This answer is to be a self-assertion of the German people in its authentic self-hood as an historical people for, according to Heidegger, a people, just like an individual human being or a group of human beings, can be estranged from its self and thus be unhistorical. Therefore he asks, “Are we historical?” (Sind wir geschichtlich? GA38:109), i.e. are we ourselves in the time-clearing of history? Heidegger makes the transition from ‘we ourselves’ arising out of a situation via institutions to the state and the people in a few bold brushstrokes:

[...] wir sind eingelassen in das Erziehungsgeschehen einer Schule, die die Hochschule der Wissenserziehung sein soll. Wir unterstellen uns den Forderungen dieser Erziehung, machen uns bereit für Berufe... Wir legen unseren Willen voraus in diese Berufe, die als solche dienen, sei es der Erziehung, sei es der Erstarkung und Ertüchtigung, sei es der inneren Ordnung des Volkes usw. Indem wir eingefügt sind in diese Forderungen der Hochschule, wollen wir den Willen eines Staates, der selbst nichts anderes sein will als der Herrschaftswille und die Herrschaftsform eines Volkes über sich selbst. Wir als Dasein fügen uns in eigener Weise hinein in die Zugehörigkeit zum Volk, wir stehen im Sein des Volkes, wir sind das Volk selbst. (GA38:57)

[...] we are inserted in the educational happenings of a school that is supposed to be a Higher School (university) of education to knowledge. We submit ourselves to the demands of this education, prepare ourselves for vocations... We put our will into these vocations from the outset which as such serve the education, the strengthening and physical fitness, the inner order, etc. of the people. By being inserted into these demands of the university/Higher School, we will the will of a state which itself does not will to be anything other than the will to rule/dominate and the form of rule/domination of a people over itself. We as Dasein insert ourselves in our own way into belonging to the people; we stand in the being of the people; we ourselves are the people.

This constitution of we ourselves as the state and people demands not just a belonging-together, i.e. an identity, but a unified identity into which “we” “insert” “ourselves”, with a totalitarian form of rule or domination of “a people over itself” that is achieved via willing where now, for the first time, Heidegger explicitly introduces the will to his chosen example. (Heidegger does not consider the possibility of the state’s rule over another people or the Schmittian distinction between the people and its enemy that elicits unity.) The transient situation in which we ourselves were first thought to come about, perhaps even against our will, by, for instance, ‘finding ourselves’ in the crowd of spectators at a car accident, is now reified, stabilized in institutions and a state of affairs that make up the complex totality of a nation state as a form of “domination” to which we will our belonging, i.e. to which we will-ingly subjugate ourselves. The will is the medium through which this constitution of national identity is said by Heidegger to take place. This will as unified will will brook no difference; on the contrary, it must be suppressed and repressed.

We as the people will the state in its stable, substantial institutions that rule over us as a people, and we will that we belong to this form of rule and domination of ourselves by “inserting” ourselves into it and “submitting” ourselves to it. Heidegger does not pose the question concerning state rule/ domination/power (Herrschaft) as a mode of being (the question of δύναμις or power as a social, sociating phenomenon; cf. Chapter 10.1), but now selfhood as we ourselves consists in our submitting ourselves to the state’s own hierarchically organized and institutionalized will to power and in serving the will of the whole. The mutually estimating power interplay among many selves is obliterated. Our belonging-together is now a permanent, unified submission to a superior, ruling, dominating will as the “state of affairs of a people” (Schmitt), and no longer a transient belonging-together that arises out of a passing situation, an ephemeral moment in which we find ourselves together, say, in a rock concert or a football game. Nor is it any longer a situation to which we can decide individually, through an act of will, to either belong to or to leave, as in the case of the student auditors of a lecture. We ourselves as the people under permanent, stable state rule have now passed over into the realm of “objective spirit” (Hegel), for which the individual decision and will to belong or not to belong no longer has any meaning; the people is a compulsory community. What the state wills is also not the ever-changing outcomes of mutually estimating power interplays among political players in compromises of various sorts.

Heidegger bases the constitution of ‘we ourselves’ as a people in the state on the observation that “human happenings [...] are deliberately willed and therefore knowing” (Das menschliche Geschehen [...] ist willentlich und deshalb wissend, GA38:86). Knowing and willing are said to be a presupposition for the constitution of ourselves as an historical people. Such knowing and willing are fully redolent of metaphysical ontology of pro-ductive, effective movement. The passage cited above is only the beginning of Heidegger’s questioning of how this knowing willing of ourselves as a people takes place in the time-clearing of history. This historical time-clearing will be investigated in more detail by Heidegger (see below), but from the outset he is at pains to distance this willing that wills ourselves as a people through the state from any form of subjecticity: “This being is never a subject and not even a collection of several subjects who only found a community on the basis of agreements; rather, only this originary unifying entity bearing exposure, ecstatic transport, tradition and a mission can be what we call ‘a people’.” (Dieses Seiende ist nie Subjekt, auch nicht eine Ansammlung mehrerer Subjekte, die auf Grund von Abmachungen erst eine Gemeinschaft gründen, sondern das ursprünglich einige, Ausgesetztheit, Entrückung, Überlieferung und Auftrag tragende Seiende kann nur sein, was wir ‘ein Volk’ nennen. GA38:157) The disparaging distancing from any “contract theory” (Vertragstheorie, GA38:143) as a “concept of state” (Staatsbegriff, GA38:143) formed by a compact of many individual subjects is thereby signalled. The state cannot be a unification coming about as originating from many individuals’ agreeing, but rather, the unification of Volk comes about by its being overcome by an historical destiny.

Subjects for Heidegger can only be worldless, Cartesian egos; he never engages with the thought that these subjects could be individuals always-already embedded in a world constituted by mutually estimating sociating interplay, including especially economic interplay, nor that the privacy of the private individual is essentially enabled by sociation being mediated by reified value, i.e. money, markets and capital, as we have investigated in earlier chapters. Heidegger (mis)identifies without further ado the ego-self of “liberalism, the age of the ego” (Zeit des Liberalismus, der Ich-Zeit, GA38:51) with the asocial, non-sociating, ego-subject of Cartesianism as the foundation of the mathematico-scientific casting of the modern world, and thus evades the task of engaging philosophically with the specifically political thinking of liberalism, which would require having to consider the sociating of humans through exchanges and power-playful interchanges of all kinds, which must be regarded as predominating modes of the movement of Mitsein-in-der-Welt.

Moreover, the ongoing mutually estimating interplay of exchange and interchange in civil society (which already is ontologically prior to any sort of mere ‘compact’ or ‘agreement’) could also be regarded as a mode in which ‘we ourselves’ are constituted in our identity as citizens engaging in the fair play of civil society, an identity that differs fundamentally from the constitution of ‘we ourselves’ through a power relation of subjugation to state domination, for it does not demand the suppression of difference. The ethos of fair play permeates a civil society based on free and fair interplay, whereas a people constituted by belonging to a state demands submission to the state’s will, no matter how construed. Such a problematic is totally absent from Heidegger’s thinking, but not so from Hegel’s and Marx’s. These latter two German thinkers do engage seriously with liberal political thinking.

Far from being inclined to think through a ‘we ourselves’ formed in a liberal society based on fair power interplay among individuals, Heidegger proceeds from the Tönnian distinction between community and society, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, where the former is conceived of as rooted, say, in “the everyday life of communal Dasein of the sequence of its temporal happenings of birth, marriage, death and changes of season” (das Tägliche des gemeinschaftlichen Daseins in der Wechselfolge seiner zeitlichen Geschehnisse von Geburt, Heirat, Tod und Jahreszeitenwechsel, GA38:66), whereas the latter is composed of modern abstract individuals who presumably do not, or hardly belong together, including “the many in the back-yard houses of the big city for whom there is not even an inclement weather” (die vielen in den Hinterhäusern der Großstadt, für die es nicht einmal eine Witterung gibt, GA38:66225). This implies that, in Heidegger’s view, there is a more originary belonging-together as a people than in the state, namely, in the established, customary way of life of a community, as opposed to the ostensibly purely abstract sociation of “individuals conscious of themselves” (der Mensch als ein seiner selbst bewußter einzelner, GA38:143) in society who, apparently, do not belong together as ‘we ourselves’ and therefore have no identity.

In his 1934 lectures, Heidegger does not think through this ‘we ourselves’ in community as a possibility of selfhood that consists in a traditional, static, rooted way of life with its own ethos, usages and habits, but rather proceeds straight from a situational constitution of ‘we ourselves’ to the constitution of a people institutionally in the state that is willed by us in serving it and by subjugating ourselves to its rule and its will. Nor does he entertain that a community, too, must have ongoing contractual exchanges of some kind, and thus a kind of interplay, even — God forbid — business intercourse. Nor does he consider that a society composed of individuals engaged in mutually estimating interplay with one another on the basis of contractual interchanges, among other kinds of interchange, could have its own traditions and ethos (of liberal fair play) with their own dignity which constitute a customary way of life that has its own permanency and continuity despite the constant changes in the specific individuals, along with countless other changes composing that way of life at any one time in any one situation or locality.

We have to ask — contra Heidegger; cf. Chapter 11.7 below — why a customary social (as distinct from a communal) way of life cannot constitute our selves as ‘we’ or even a people and ground a belonging-together and a people’s identity that in no way depends on the members of that ‘we’ remaining constant, as in the case of settled rural village life rooted in the ever-recurring cycles of nature that Heidegger seems to take as implicit paradigm. On the contrary, the way of life could be in constant flux with regard to its specific members, and may also itself be in flux through modifications and adaptations over time whilst retaining its customary modes of social intercourse and a sense of belonging-together in civil society, despite the fact that this civil society does not have to constitute itself as a unified will, but rather consists in the spontaneous, unplanned power interplay of a multitude of individual wills, each pursuing its aims and interests in interchange with others. If these considerations are plausible, then indeed there can be a rootedness of ‘we ourselves’ as a people consisting in our embeddedness within the customary, traditional, universal forms and ethos of (fair, and therefore just) interplay of civil society, albeit that these socio-ontological modes of sociating enable an historically unprecedented dynamism of social living and can also assume countless, unforeseen, concrete, historical guises.

Let us return to time-clearing of history to consider more deeply how, according to Heidegger, it is involved in constituting a people. It must be kept in mind that Heidegger is speaking at a particular historical moment, 1934, with the National Socialists in power, giving lectures to his students whom he confronts with the questions, “Are you yourselves genuinely, authentically a part of the people?”, “Are we an historical people?” This is a rhetorical situation structured according to first and second person, and the questions are not merely rhetorical but are intended to go to the heart of what it means to be I myself, we ourselves, you yourselves. Despite the historical moment of 1934 being an historical situation into which the German people, i.e. we have been cast without any act of will, just like the we formed by a crowd as crowd spontaneously and will-lessly gathering at the scene of a car accident, he claims that this question regarding being ourselves as part of history can only be settled through will, through a decision.

Irgendeine Entschiedenheit macht unser Selbst jetzt aus. Das kleine und enge Wir des Augenblicks der Vorlesung hat uns mit einem Schlag in das Volk versetzt... (GA38:58)

Some decisiveness or other now constitutes our self. The small and narrow we of the moment of the lectures has transposed us in one fell swoop into the people...

This decision and decisiveness concerns “whether we want to co-operate in acting or whether we want to act against” (ob wir mithandeln wollen oder zuwider, GA38:72). Act for or against in which direction? Is it a simple either/or decision that makes the incision between us, who willingly submit, and them, the unwilling ones who must be forced into submission against their will? The decision and decisiveness do not merely concern affirming the status quo, but, according to Heidegger, are only genuine, authentic decision and decisiveness if the Entschiedenheit is Entschlossenheit. Entschlossenheit is standardly rendered as ‘resoluteness’, but this is entirely misleading, for Heidegger thinks Entschlossenheit as a “Sichöffnen” (GA38:75), as an “opening up of oneself”. Entschlossenheit must therefore be thought as a resolute, decisive opening up of myself, of ourselves to possibilities which, of course, can only arrive from the future:

Es gilt, in eine Entschlossenheit zu kommen oder die Möglichkeit dafür vorzubereiten. [...] In der Entschlossenheit ist der Mensch vielmehr in das künftige Geschehen eingerückt. Die Entschlossenheit ist selbst ein Geschehnis, das, jenem Geschehen vorgreifend, das Geschehen ständig mit bestimmt. (GA38:76, 77)

What counts is to come into a resolute openness or to prepare the possibility for it. [...] In resolute openness, rather, people have moved out into future happenings. Resolute openness is itself a happening that, anticipating [lit. pre-grasping, ME] those happenings, continually co-determines those happenings.

Hence, after all, it is not possible to merely decide to be a people. What counts, according to Heidegger, is not simply a decision and a decisiveness, but an openness to possibilities that can only arrive from the future. It is not even possible to decide, through an act of will, to be resolutely open, for we have to come into such an openness and may even only be able to prepare the possibility of so coming into an openness for future happenings that can be fore-seen (perhaps?) in their historically imminent arrival. The possibility of moving into resolute openness does not lie within the power of our will, but remains at one remove from us. To put it in German: Die Möglichkeit des Einrückens in die Entschlossenheit ist der Macht unseres Willens entrückt. Das Einrücken ist dem Entrücken ausgeliefert. Even once we have come into a resolute openness (not through our own mere act of will), we only anticipate or ‘pre-grasp’ future happenings and are able to co-shape and co-cast them. The decisiveness that Heidegger appeals to is thus much mediated and concerns only a readiness to be open to future possibilities rather than insisting on and setting ourselves up comfortably in the status quo of what has been and continues to be thoughtlessly reproduced. And do not future possibilities demand an interplay of powers to adequately assess them as possibilites and not as certainties? With the above-quoted passages we can see, however, how the decisiveness that is necessary for even the possibility of becoming ourselves as a people turns upon an openness to happenings in the time-clearing. To become an historical people requires of us to be open to the happenings (Geschehen) of history (Geschichte). This makes our very selfhood as ourselves into a temporal determination:

Wir dürfen uns selbst nicht mehr als in der Zeit Vorkommende verstehen, wir müssen uns erfahren als die, die von früher her wesend über sich selbst hinausgreifend aus der Zukunft sich bestimmen, d.h. aber: als die, die selbst die Zeit sind. Wir sind die Zeitigung der Zeit selbst. (GA38:120)

We may no longer understand ourselves as beings occurring in time; we have to experience ourselves as those who, presencing from earlier and grasping out beyond themselves, determine themselves out of the future, and that means, as those who are themselves time. We are the coming about of time itself.

The radicality of this statement — which now goes far beyond the constitution of we ourselves in a situation — cannot be over-estimated, for it formulates the dissolution of the substantiality, the standing presence of us even as a people in time itself. But time in what sense? With this statement Heidegger shows himself as a radical, and by no means a conservative thinker. Our connection with temporality could not be more intimate, for, Heidegger claims, we are ourselves the coming about of time in its three-dimensional extension. We ourselves come about as the coming about of time itself. This is the temporal sense of Dasein, of human being itself, now pluralized as we. We can only become our selves in time and as time by answering, responding (Verantwortung, GA38:121) to the happening of history. History is no longer to be thought as significant occurrences in time, but as the happening of historical time itself.

Geschichte überliefert sich in die Zukunft, gibt von dort her vor, wer und was sie sein kann. [...] Zukunft und Gewesenheit sind in sich einige Zeitmächte, die Macht der Zeit selbst, in der wir stehen. Wir sind nur zukünftig, indem wir die Gewesenheit als Überlieferung übernehmen. (GA38:124)

History delivers itself over into the future and from there it lays down who and what it can be. [...] Future and beenness are in themselves unified temporal powers, the power of time itself, in which we stand. We are only futural by taking on beenness as tradition.

Tradition, Überlieferung is literally that which has been handed over, delivered over. We take on and accept the tradition out of the future in shaping the happenings that come toward us. This is our historical being as the coming about of historical time itself. According to Heidegger, our decisiveness in the historical moment is only the openness to the coming about of we ourselves as historical time itself. We can only become we ourselves in deciding to be open-minded in a radical sense of an open-mindedness toward the arrival of the future. The division between us and them, between those who “want to co-operate” and those who “want to act against” (GA38:72), would therefore be the opposition between open- and closed-mindedness toward futural historical possibilities. Only from this perspective can Heidegger say that there is a possibility that we are not ourselves, that we are not historical as a people. We close off the possibility of becoming ourselves by closing ourselves off to the still living tradition as it is delivered over alive to the future that comes toward us as a way of co-casting our selves into our future in a mode of living together. Such closing ourselves off is a kind of mental blindness. The so-called “power of time” is not something that stands at our disposition; rather we bring ourselves to a stand in taking on what the temporal power of beenness or yesterness delivers over to us as an open task and mission. We stand in responsibility to history as a responding and answering to historical time, not in any moral sense (cf. GA38:121), but in the ontological sense of the possibility of becoming and being who we are ourselves.

Our ontological responsibility is to respond to possibilities which we can only see, or rather, inkle as possibilities — and not as predictable certainties — inchoately shaping up by taking on and engaging with the tradition that has already shaped who we have been. In this sense, history, as the happening of time itself, is open, i.e. open to recasting, not by way of casting a fore-seeable, fore-knowable plan, but through an open engagement with who we have been that loosens up the tradition, thus enabling, perhaps, other possibilities of self-casting to gain historical shape through power interplays with each other into the temporal dimension of the future. The (decisive) question remains, however, concerning precisely what historical possibilities can be made out taking shape on the horizon of the future through engaging with what has been handed down, and the (divisive) strife and conflict over such possible arrivals. We can in any case see that, insofar as Heidegger’s conception of the constituting of we ourselves as a people in and as historical time through openness toward the future is accepted on its word, it differs radically in its non-closure from Hegel’s conception of the “world spirit” (Weltgeist, RPh. § 352) coming to itself in world history, consummating itself in the highest stage of its unfolding as the “Germanic Reich” (das germanische Reich, RPh. § 358).

The “time” that Heidegger conjures is not the traditional 1D-linear conception of time, but the 3D-temporality of the time-clearing for which there is the possibility of moving easily from what has been in one temporal dimension to what is possibly coming toward us from another temporal dimension, viz. the future. This originary 3D-temporal clearing is prior to movement, whereas the traditional 1D-linear conception of time is merely lifted off movement. Therefore it is entirely misleading of Heidegger to speak of we ourselves as the coming-about of time itself. Rather, we ourselves are engaged, through mutual estimating power plays, in casting how the world could shape up hermeneutically in future by retrieving former casts of our historical world and recasting them. The issue of blindness toward the future concerns above all the denial of the possibility of recasting and co-casting hermeneutically within the temporal clearing of history. An assessment of what has been requires an ontological thinking that can at all see the hermeneutic casting of the beingness of beings in an age, thus keeping the ontological difference open. Resistance comes most of all from those conservative quarters with their vested interests in the status quo that assert that ‘we’ have already reached the end of history, its final τελός and that only further ‘progress’ along the same line is to follow.

11.6We the people and singular, rare individuals – The ethos of open-mindedness – Abstract personhood, interplay through a reified medium and the historical possibility of the free individual – The impossible mediation between universality and singularity – Singularity’s shelter in the abstract rights of particularity – Heidegger’s conjuring of a “fundamental attunement” among the people to support the work of a rare, singular individual

Ταύτας τοίνυν τὰς τῶν μαθημάτων ἡδονὰς ἀμείκτους τε εῖναι λύπαις ῥητέον καὶ οὐδαμῶς τῶν πολλῶν ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ τῶν σφόδρα ὀλίγων.

Plato Philebos 52b

Then it must be said that these pleasures of learning are unmixed with pain and are not for the many but only for the very few.

In the preceding there has been talk of ‘we ourselves’ taking on the challenge of history in answering to the tradition. But is there really the possibility of an authentic we as a people constituted in this way through decision, resolute openness and answering to the call of history, and that through the mediation of the state, as Heidegger outlines in 1934? Heidegger himself makes a distinction during this very discussion between the community and certain special, rare, lonely individuals:

Es gibt Dinge, die für eine Gemeinschaft wesentlich und entscheidend sind, und gerade diese Dinge erwachsen nicht in der Gemeinschaft, sondern in der beherrschten Kraft und Einsamkeit eines einzelnen. (GA38:15 cf. GA38:56)

There are things that are essential and decisive for a community, and precisely these things do not arise in the community, but in the controlled, disciplined power and lonely solitude of an individual.

These rare and lonely individuals gifted (poisoned?) with a special creative power, who remain always singular and can never be absorbed by a we, are essential and crucial for something — precious little — to arise in the community that otherwise would be missing. These individuals must have some sort of forecasting fore-sight or fore-inkling into the historical time of hermeneutic casting, having received some sort of message. They (if it is at all admissible, rather than impossible, to refer to such singular individuals in the plural) are the singular ones, apparently eluding any we, who take on and engage critically with the tradition (of whatever kind) and are therefore in a position as an avant-garde to co-cast and recast how the future could possibly arrive in the present of a people. The people themselves, ‘we ourselves’ as a whole, can never see or know about the hidden transmission lines between the tradition that has been and its reshaping and recasting by exceptional, rare individuals as it arrives from the future. Keeping in mind Heidegger’s starting-point in “willing” and “submitting”, how could a people ever be authentically historical through a decision, decisiveness and resolute openness? Could it not ever only blindly submit? To what? Or is an hermeneutic recasting of an historical world so rare and so unheard of that another world shapes up historically more or less noticed and is never, in any case, seen to be an ontological recasting as such, but perhaps is noticed only in certain symptoms of a deeper change.

Aren’t there “things that are essential and decisive for a community” on which the community cannot decide? After all, a community or a people lives only within preontological conceptions, never comprehending the hermeneutic As as such. Furthermore, isn’t a people, immersed as it is in the well-worn ruts of normal, customary everyday life, always, at least tendentially, suspicious of those rare, creative individuals in its midst whom it cannot understand? Isn’t there an essential friction and conflict between the conservative inertia of an established, ingrained, also cherished, traditional way of life of a people and its recasting through impulses emitted by possibilities arriving from the future that are defined, precast and moulded, at least in ontological outline, by the works of certain rare, fore-seeing or at least fore-inkling individuals, the people’s (or, more cosmopolitanly, the world’s) thinkers? Aren’t these rare, fore-casting individuals, sacrificial midwives of coming historical truths they help shape, more often than not singular outsiders who do not succeed in life in any conventional sense because their contemporaries do not and cannot see and recognize them for who they are, caught as they are in the ambiguity of being regarded as either a far-seeing, gifted genius or as a blinded autist, a dangerous, poisonous radical or even an irrelevant crackpot or pitiable madman?

Doesn’t the future come to be recast, if at all, in the crucible of the historical time-clearing precisely against the friction and positive resistance of an invariably ‘conservative’ people and all the institutions and ‘accepted values’ supporting this people? Isn’t it above all the elite within a people, including the intellectual elite, that is invested most of all in the status quo? Doesn’t the reshaping of the historical way of living of a people, the recasting of historical time take place willy-nilly and behind the backs of the people constituted as ‘we ourselves’ in the sense of belonging together in a settled, customary way of life? Aren’t ‘we ourselves’ for the most part backward-looking rather than forward-looking? And is it not the case that Heidegger (and I) are talking here only in a singular conjuncture of Western history when former time meets an oncoming future in a present that calls for an hermeneutic recasting precisely because the ontological cast of world hitherto has become historically exhausted? Preceding chapters have shown in detail that the metaphysical ontology of movement as productive, effective, efficient has run its course and has been consummated.

If a disparity exists between a people and singular thinkers, then how could the will of a people, as Heidegger claims (GA38:57), play any crucial role in constituting it as an authentic, historical people? Aren’t we the people introduced willy-nilly into an oncoming historical time only through being overwhelmed by changes that simply ‘happen’ to us, without us knowing whence such changes, such recastings of social living come? Could there not merely be at most a will, if at all, — or rather, an ethos — of open-mindedness, i.e. an ethos of a people being receptive for and supporting and perhaps even celebrating those unique, eccentric individuals in its midst, conveyors and heralds of strange, historically incipient truths, whom it does not (yet) understand? Would this not amount to an ethos of the preservation and protection of and receptiveness for the singularity of human being, an appreciation of why such singularity and even eccentricity of a biographical orbit must not be subsumed violently under the universality of a community, a society or a state by being compelled to conform to mores, but rather granted degrees of freedom of movement to follow its singular course?226 Or is this asking for far too much, because an alternative cast can only come to light and find dissemination through bitter struggles? Could we as a people (no matter how homogeneously or heterogeneously such a people is conceived) nurture an habitual, customary sensibility, an ethos, for protecting human singularity against the violence of all-too-common sense? If openness toward the future is what is called for, would this not presuppose and demand that the people precisely not decide resolutely on a unified act of will that results in submission to the state, as Heidegger suggests, but rather cultivate a civil-social ethos of open-mindedness that enables singularities to flourish, thereby loosening the state’s rule over society to the maximum possible extent?

If singularity requires mediation with the universal, whilst nonetheless never gaining perfect identity with it, but rather remaining forever rent with an unresolvable contradiction and opposition, this can only be achieved, if at all, through the mediation of particularity, which breaks down the claim of unified, identical universality into differing parts, insofar admitting difference, diversity, specificity under which singularity, too, in its eccentric uniqueness and therefore painfully broken, has at least some room to breathe and sometimes — in the coming about of an historically propitious, unusually receptive time — is perhaps even able to thrive. The freedom of particularity with which we are familiar in the West (and now worldwide, at least ideally) has the form (i.e. the ontological look) of the rights of the individual human being, i.e. the rights of civil freedom that came about and shaped up historically (especially in the seventeenth century with its singular thinkers, including Hobbes and Locke) as the modern age within historical time and were nurtured under the auspices of liberalism.

The core of individual liberty in the modern age consists in the freedom of exchange and interchange, and this metabolism of civil society is a power interplay among individuals endowed with abstract, universal rights that lend them the dignity of personhood. The very abstractness of the rights of personhood which abstract from the concrete living situations of members of society and guarantee their indifference toward each other, although so often deplored as an alienation from the social nature of human being, is the condition of possibility not only for the pursuit of particular self-interest in social interplay, but also for the private sphere as the place of guaranteed withdrawal from society, and such a private sphere, guaranteed by natural right and law, is the sine qua non for singular individuality to find shelter from the conventional, conservative ethics of social reality and to assert and live also its non-identity with, its not belonging to the historically already realized, concrete ethical institutions of universality. Such singular individuality must not be maligned as mere caprice and arbitrariness, for it is also the ultimate source of freedom in its actual reality from which a more or less far-reaching recasting of world can emerge in a re-generation within the time-clearing of history.

As we have seen throughout this study, liberalism is intimately and in essence related with a market economy based on private property that admits, through the reification of its value-medium, the ongoing power interplay of particular self-interests in a spontaneous sociating power play not controlled and directed by an overarching, ruling state will. The liberal state’s foremost task is to preserve the framework or playform of civil society, i.e. above all its forms of intercourse as forms of fair interplay, and not to intervene in civil society with aims (especially of paternalistically caring for the people) posited by will, but rather to allow the concreteness of civil society to come about as the ongoing outcome of a power plays among social players. The liberal state as the guarantor first and foremost of abstract personhood remains in essence indifferent to the concrete particularity and especially the individual singularity of members of society. This abstract indifference signals the state’s distance from the private sphere, the hesitation of the state as the institution of concrete universality to differentiate or particularize itself into the particularity of different, particular, prescribed ways of living. The organic whole of a viable society comes about only as the ongoing, spontaneous metabolism of civil society with its interplay of particularity. Within this interplay, whose forms remain abstract and guaranteed through abstract personhood, individual singularity, for better or worse, finds its niche.

Abstract personhood is that socio-ontological state which historically enables the free individual for the first time, dis-sociating human beings from each other as sociated primarily through the mediation of an abstract, reified interplay. Contrary to modern, natural-right conceptions of the state that proceed from the premiss of pre-social, isolated, free individuals, it must be seen that the free individual is always already an individual engaged in the reified interplay and that without such a reified form of sociation there is no free individual at all. This reified form of sociation that engenders and preserves the private individual as free and dis-sociated nevertheless has its own strength and resilience. Such a free individual did not exist in antiquity, although its germ was already present in ancient Greece.

The ancients, including Aristotle in his ethical and political writings, Hegel notes, were “unfamiliar with the abstract right of our modern states which isolates the individual, allows it to do as it likes (so that it is regarded essentially as a person) and nevertheless holds them all together as a more invisible spirited mind” (unbekannt mit dem abstrakten Recht unserer modernen Staaten, das den Einzelnen isoliert, ihn als solchen gewähren läßt (so daß er wesentlich als Person gilt) und doch als ein unsichtbarerer Geist alle zusammenhält, VGPII W19:36). Such a “holding together” recalls already Aristotle’s formulation of how usage and money hold everything together (cf. Chapter 4.5 and passim), whereas the “more invisible spirited mind” is an echo of Hegel’s reading of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, translated into the speculative language of “objective spirited mind”, i.e. of socio-ontological forms.

Liberal theory itself has only ever concerned itself, in Hegelian terminology, with the mediation between universality and particularity, i.e. between the claims of society and the rights of individuals. Insofar, freedom in the liberal sense can be understood in a relatively bland way as the particular individual’s (strictly speaking, an oxymoron) right to do what it wants as long as it does not infringe the exercise of other particular individuals’ rights. Freedom then seems to be a matter of individual, arbitrary caprice and can be understood merely as the pursuit of average, normal happiness, including tawdry consumerism, which therefore can well be sacrificed for a purportedly higher, social good or, in pure liberal theory, at least guided cleverly by the state, as the instance of the universal, into alignment with the general good. But this casting of human being to consist of two moments is truncated, omitting as it does the third moment of singularity, the existential-ontological site of genuine individuality. Whereas particularity is the particularization of universality into parts, allowing particularity (as, say, a system of the totality of needs in their particularity) to be contained within universality through liberal forms of intercourse, there is no such easy mediation of the gulf between particularity and singularity. No matter how concrete the manifold determinations of particularity become, they can never capture singularity, which always eludes them. This is to say that human being itself is existentially rent in a primal split (Urteil; cf. Chapter 3.3.1.5) between the extremes of universality and singularity, with the mediating moment of particularity being unable to close the extremes together into an identity.

As singularly individual, human being itself is contradictory and torn in being simultaneously a part of the universal, i.e., in this context, a social being that shares the world with others. The moment of singularity reaches into the abyss, beyond any possible reconciliation with universality in an identity. It can only ever be repressed and kept at bay in a kind of normality of the individual, or at most granted a certain freedom of movement beneath abstract-universal social forms. The exceptionally able individual is recognized by others, if at all, only in particular terms assimilable to a general, universal understanding that does not and cannot reach into singularity, no matter how much average understanding may try. As essentially abyssal, singularity itself is unsayable. It only ever erupts with fragmentary forms of meaning in art and philosophy. Individual singularity can therefore only ever seek shelter in the particularity of individual freedoms abstractly guaranteed through the universal form of personhood, and this is a great merit of liberalism, although scarcely recognized as such. Precisely the ‘cold’ abstractness of reified social forms enables hyperborean singularity to breathe. As noted above, such hyperborean singularity is needed today for hermeneutic recasting.

As has been shown, however, Heidegger explicitly rejects liberalism, which he regards (very superficially for a philosopher) as the capricious individualism of abstract, uprooted, ‘worldless’ individuals that can result only in the ‘decadence’ of modern life. He yearns instead for the unity of an autochthonous, homogeneous people rooted in a substantive way of life, and constituted in an act of decisive, resolutely open willing that conforms seamlessly with the “will of a state”. (GA38:57) Even when Heidegger imagines that the resolute openness of a people can only be “prepared” (GA38:76, cf. above) or could take fifty or so years to come to fruition (as he suggests in two talks he gave in 1933; cf. GA16 No. 155 and Chapter 12.2.1), this hope must be regarded as wishful and dogmatic thinking founded not merely on a political, but on a philosophical, i.e. ontological lack of understanding of the (impossible) mediated relationship among universality, particularity and singularity. The mediation between politicosocial universality and singularity posited by Heidegger is that of authoritarian subsumption, leaving no room for an interplay among universality, particularity and singularity which, as has been shown (Chapter 3.3.1.3), Hegel at least attempts to think through dialectically. Let us further examine how Heidegger outlines the constitution of ‘we ourselves’ as an historical people.

Heidegger characterizes the constitution of the, presumably homogeneous, German people as ‘we ourselves’ in historical time and, purportedly, as historical time as an experience of going through (Erfahrung, GA38:126) our determination or even destiny (Bestimmung, GA38:127ff). We have to ask whether “we” “go through” (erfahren) our historical determination and destiny. The “fundamental attunement of a people” (Grundstimmung eines Volks, GA38:130) is said to support and enable “a great work” (ein großes Werk, GA38:130) of creative individuals living and working in the people’s midst. Could such a “fundamental attunement” possibly be, as suggested above, that of open-mindedness?

Die Gewesenheit als Überlieferung und die Zukunft (als auf uns zukommend) als Aufgabe halten das Dasein im Grunde und schon immer in einer Entschränkung. Ausgesetzt in die Stimmung und entrückt in die Arbeit, sind wir geschichtlich. Die Macht der Zeit zeitigt ursprünglich und nicht nachträglich die Entrückung des Daseins in die Zukunft und Gewesenheit. (GA38:155)

Beenness as tradition and the future (as coming toward us) as task and mission hold Dasein fundamentally and a priori in a removal of barriers. Exposed to attunement and transported into work, we are historical. The power of time brings about originarily and not subsequently the ecstatic transport of Dasein into the future and into beenness.

The temporal structure of the historical time of a people as which, according to Heidegger, it is to come about (sich zeitigen), is the temporal structure of individual Dasein as developed in Sein und Zeit but now writ large, as the existence of an entire people, a whole nation that comes to its we-self. What is the mediation between individual Dasein which recollects its beenness and casts itself into its very own, individual future and the historical Dasein of a people? How is this gulf to be bridged, given that, at least as late as 1928, at a time when he engaged in debate with Max Scheler, Heidegger still regarded it as “a problem how Dasein as essentially free can exist in the freedom of factically bound togetherness”? (es ist ein Problem, wie das Dasein als wesenhaft freies in der Freiheit des faktisch gebundenen Miteinanderseins existieren kann227) And this problem is, ironically, the fundamental question of that liberalism which Heidegger so contemptuously rejects! Heidegger offers us little to go on in searching for mediation. For instance,

[...] ist, aus der ursprünglichen Erfahrung des Menschseins aus der Zeitlichkeit und damit des geschichtlichen Seins verstanden, Vereinzelung auf echte Weise möglich und not-wendig, nur dürfen wir den einzelnen nicht nach der Vorstellung des Subjektes denken. Die Vereinzelung in der Einsamkeit kann in einzigartiger Weise für das Ganze wirksam sein. Umgekehrt beweist betriebsames Dabeisein noch längst nicht die lebendige Volksverbundenheit; sie versteckt vielmehr Eigensucht. (GA38:157)

[...] understood from the original experience of human being from temporality and thus of historical being, singularization in a genuine way is possible and necessary, but we must not think of the individual according to the idea of the subject. Singularization in the sense of solitude can be effective for the whole in a unique way. Conversely, busy involvement with what is going on does not prove a lively bond with the people; rather it hides self-seeking egoism.

This structurally unified coming-about in historical time which an historical people is supposed to be depends upon an overcoming or a suppression of the Unwesen or ‘degenerate essence’ of the people as a collection of self-seeking egoists. Such individual self-seeking has no place in Heidegger’s casting of the temporality of an historical people; it is for him degenerate human being, i.e. an Unwesen, an outgrowth of the modern age of subjectivist metaphysics and its purportedly associated “liberalism” (GA38:51, 149, cf. GA38:143) of arbitrary and capricious individualism. Such individual self-seeking, it would seem according to Heidegger, needs to be morally, and then politically suppressed (instead of particularity, at least, being mediated dialectically and spontaneously with the universal, as in Hegel’s thinking). According to Heidegger’s peculiar version of “socialism” (Sozialismus; GA38:165), we become ourselves as an historical people in deciding to be unified and knowing ourselves unified in the shared work of a task and mission arriving from the future that has arisen from the tradition having delivered over its destinal mission to the future, and we are borne in this shared task by “grand fundamental attunements” (große Grundstimmungen, GA38:130). But are not attunements, no matter how grand, fickle and open to conflicting interpretations?

How can we as an historical people know of the necessity of “ singularization in the sense of solitude” which “can be effective for the whole in a unique way”? Or is it a matter only of the people inkling — in an attunement of open-mindedness that is nothing other than openness and receptivity for an ontological recasting of world in the 3D-temporal clearing of an age, our own — the importance for its own selfhood as a people of certain rare individuals? How is the individual who hears the calling to work in solitude to find a niche for this work within the bosom of the people and the established institutions of state? How is a singular, creative individual to find the freedom to pursue his or her calling, given the unified, totalized will of the people and state? Is it enough for the individual “to have the urge within him/herself which authorizes him/her to solitude” (der freilich in sich den Drang haben muß, der ihn zu der Einsamkeit berechtigt, GA38:56)? Does this amount to a kind of (arbitrary, nay, capricious) self-authorization on the part of the individual who feels an “urge”?

Whence does this urge, in turn, receive its authorization? Whence does it receive its guaranteed freedom of expression within the social whole? Indeed, how is a National Socialist “hierarchy according to vocation and work” (Rangordnung nach Berufung und Werk, GA38:165) to come about and be reconciled with the singular urge of an individual to work in solitude? Who is to have the power of determining this “hierarchy”? Is it to be decided on the basis of merit and competition among individuals exercising their individual powers and abilities? How is the structure, i.e. how are the banal, everyday social power plays of this envisaged National Socialist society to provide for the individuation of its singular individuals as a vital possibility and necessity? How is the “individual” invoked here by Heidegger to be distinguished from the (liberal, metaphysical) “subject” he so disparagingly rejects? It is hardly sufficient merely to proclaim with a vacuous rhetorical gesture that the appropriately attuned “individual” could be concretely embedded in the bosom of the people, whereas the “subject” of the liberal era remains an abstract, uprooted figure lacking an historical world.

Heidegger’s casting of a kind of (National) Socialism as a way in which an historical people could bring itself about as ‘we ourselves’ pretty clearly excludes the rights of particularity, i.e. the highly proclaimed individual civil rights of the liberal age, including above all private property, which provide the room for movement, not only for self-interests to play themselves out in sometimes unseemly rivalry, but also for singular, individual independence to be maintained from both the concrete institutions of established political power and the social pressures of conventional ethical life. The caprice which individualized, private property rights enable under the mantle of the abstract, universal recognition of each individual as a person, may well be lamented by those ‘intellectuals’ who condemn the ‘alienation’ of reified ‘social relations’ and decry the descent of the individualized masses into tinselly, tawdry, tacky consumerism, but personhood, through its very abstractness and guaranteed indifference, also opens and protects a precious little space for certain singular, rare individuals to devote themselves to their ownmost calling and work of recasting — perhaps a people’s — historical future behind its back, despite the cold indifference and/ or heated resistance of the recognized, traditional institutions (especially of learning and of culture) in which a people’s Geist hitherto has been supposed to be at home, ensconced in the comfortable exercise of their power and recognizing only those as estimable somebodies who adhere to the rules of power play of their established power game. It must not be forgotten that the transmission lines of historical truth are power lines.

This brings the phenomenon of whoness back into play, since those singular, creative individuals who have a special, irreplaceable role in co-casting the inkled possibilities (not the foreseeable certainties) in the historical time-clearing by casting a work of historical truth are whos and jemeiniges Dasein. Even when working in “lonely solitude” (GA38:15) in a laboratory of the future, these rare individuals can nevertheless only be who they are through the ongoing interplay of estimation through which an individual Dasein comes to stand as who he or she is, choosing and grasping his or her ownmost possibilities of existing from all the masks mirrored to it by others, especially those supportive others such as a teacher, mentor or a patron. The power play of the estimation interplay with others in coming to one’s self and learning who one is to be must be, if not free and fair, then at least must provide a crevice to allow the necessary “lonely solitude” and individuation in which these rare, gifted individuals can devote themselves to their respective individual, ownmost tasks in exercising their creative abilities for the sake of something (that may turn out to be) “essential and decisive for a community”. (GA38:15)

Since any genuinely creative task and mission (and in our present conjuncture this is a task of ontological rethinking) is historically fore-casting, it cannot be understood by the people. It must be a casting ahead of its present time to be genuinely what it is. The exceptional individual exists in an interstice between dimensions of the historical time-clearing. This means that the appropriate estimation of a special, creative individual as such in the present time may be refused altogether, as if this individual’s whoness had evaporated and counted for nought. In a more favourable case, it is only through struggle and controversy that this singular individual may be able to overcome the crudest misunderstandings and present the outlines of what is gathering and shaping up from the future as an historical possibility of hermeneutic recasting, and perhaps even gain recognition by others that the work performed has value (if not market value).

11.7The socio-ontological critique of liberalism – Contract as the abstractly universal shell-form for the metabolism of civil society – The possibility and ethos of a liberal We in free and fair interplay

Through this discussion it should have become apparent that Heidegger’s conception of ‘we ourselves’ as an historical people and its relation to those singular individuals who, he claims, have an indispensable role in casting and shaping the time-clearing of a people’s history, remains highly problematic and, not just politically (say, merely because it is ‘anti-liberal’), but, more deeply, socio-ontologically ill thought out. The “problem” of reconciling “how Dasein as essentially free can exist in the freedom of factically bound togetherness” (GA26:175) is in the first place a philosophical, socio-ontological problem that goes to the heart of the question of human being itself, and not merely a problem of how a society is to be set up politically with an appropriate constitution. Moreover, Heidegger’s statement of a “problem”, perhaps despite his intentions, can be regarded as a formulation of the socio-ontological problem of liberalism with which the tradition of liberalism itself has not confronted itself, instead taking individual freedom as an axiomatic given, as somehow self-evident, which is, philosophically, always a bad sign.

One could very well claim that liberalism has already long since had its heyday and its day. After all, its fathers, Hobbes and Locke, lived already in the seventeenth century, and in the meantime, liberalism has been much maligned and unmasked, including as an ‘ideology representing the class interests of the bourgeoisie’, or as a ‘capitalist free-market ideology’ that serves to ride roughshod over the poor and disadvantaged or to blithely neglect major issues such as today’s environmental problems, or as ‘Neo-liberalism’ which aims at turning back the historical clock by undoing the ‘achievements’ of the modern social-welfare state. Furthermore, philosophically as well, liberalism has been subjected to trenchant critiques, including by Hegel, who has roundly deconstructed the ‘contract theory’ of society as ontologically naïve. Hegel’s apposite critique — e.g. society cannot be regarded as an “atomistic heap of individuals” (atomistischer Haufen von Individuen, RPh.§ 273 Note) or his socio-ontological insight that commonality is the crudest conception of the universal — even parallels to some extent Heidegger’s deconstruction of subject-object dualism to show and insist that Dasein is always already being-in-the-world-with-others, albeit that the socio-ontological question concerning how Dasein and Dasein share the world in Mitsein remains underdeveloped in Heidegger’s thinking.

These philosophical critiques of liberalism, however, do not by any means dispose of the free individual at the heart of liberal thinking, but merely situate it anew as a priori already in the social world. Hegel, in particular, does not negate “subjective freedom” — which would amount to abstractly rejecting the core of liberalism, whose essence is individual freedom — but seeks to integrate, i.e. sublate it into a reconciled totality. Despite the flaws that can be pointed out in Hegel’s supposed dialectical reconciliation of individual freedom with universality in a State that must be regarded as overbearing and even authoritarian (cf. Chapter 12), Hegel nevertheless remains true to the phenomenon of human freedom itself insofar as he acknowledges that the freedom of human being, like the truth of being, is, of its deepest nature, individualized, i.e. singularized, no matter to what bond an individual human being may commit itself.

Heidegger, by contrast, in his abstract negation of individual freedom from the 1930s on, proposes an authoritarian concept of ‘authentic’ individual freedom as submission and even self-sacrifice to a necessity, namely, that of a greater universal — the call and claim of being itself — which presumably motivated also his initial commitment to National Socialism. In the present study, the existential-ontologically resituated individual in its whoness is always already engaged in the mutually estimating power interplay through which it comes to be who it is, which includes committing itself freely and through its own thinking to others, to tasks and missions and even to larger, ‘universal’ causes, whilst never surrendering the moment of singularity at the core of human being. Moreover, these individuals are such only by virtue of the abstract, reified, individualizing relations of a society based on the medium of reified value and they are only tied back into society as a universal connection precisely through the ongoing interplay within these abstract, reified, universal sociating power plays, which is a basic form of modern ethical life.

If the socio-ontological critique of liberalism is tenable, then the free individual is always already in the world as Mitsein (Heidegger), i.e. as shared being-in-the-world, or, in Hegelian terms, the individual has already been raised willy-nilly to the level of reason with its objectifications in the forms of ethical life. This means that a kind of liberal We has always already been constituted; the social world can never be thought as derived from a multitude of individuals, for these individuals as somewhos are always already immersed and entangled in the sociating interplay, in order to even be who they are. Even the moralistically much maligned cell form of interplay in modern society, the contract, although constituted freely and capriciously by two or more individuals entering into it, already exceeds the sum of the two individual contractual parties, bringing about a form or ‘look’ of shared freedom with its own socio-ontological dignity that is irreducible to (the compromising sum of) two single wills.

The contract as a free, reciprocal giving of one’s word raises the parties into a freely constituted We which is then binding on both parties and therefore beyond each party individually. Even though the incentive to enter a contract may be pure, arbitrary self-interest on each side, the contract as a form of free mutuality has already bound the self-interests into a We to which both parties are obligated, and that in complete correspondence with each of their particular free wills. Even though the individual parties are free to enter or not to enter a specific contract, and are insofar capricious free wills, their freely give commitment to a contractual We is itself a ‘look’ of (now sociated) freedom, and therefore corresponds to the being of free will as such, i.e. the contractual We is true in the Hegelian sense. Keeping one’s word in a contract is therefore itself an issue and noble expression of freedom, for the individual parties are bound to their word given in a freely constituted We. They have freely constituted and subjected themselves to a common will which is more than merely common, but an sich, inherently universal, i.e. ‘infinite’ or ‘absolute’.228

The contract is the abstract shell-form of intercourse in civil society based on private property, which is itself a face of freedom as the individual taking-possession of thingly beings in the world. As such, the contract-form is an abstractly universal shell open to receiving infinitely many different contents, and therefore can be concretized in countless different ways each representing a Gestalt of habitual, ethical life in its interplay. Furthermore, the contractual form is also the abstractly universal form of movement, of metabolism of civil society as a form of mutually mirroring interplay which, in the first place, is based on recognition of each other as abstractly free persons, independently of whether a contract is entered into or not. Civil society in its movement is therefore, in the first (socio-ontological) place, formally an abstract, mirroring interplay among free persons. Substantially, or rather with regard to the content that fills this shell of formally free and civil interplay, civil society’s movement is able to take up all sorts of contents in myriad interchanges. Civil society therefore builds a bewilderingly complex network of metabolic interchanges which is civil social life itself. This bewilderingly diverse interplay itself is nothing other than an intermeshing, mutually estimating exercise of the individual freedom of the countless individuals involved who, in turn, are themselves bound by the commitments they have freely entered. Hence, beyond the cell form of the contract that brings two parties into play with one another and binds them to a contractual We, there is the infinitely complex metabolism of the interplay of civil society itself, which, as a form of free interplay, also has the socio-ontological dignity of a free, civil, social We to which the participants are bound and committed. The players in the complex, universal interplay that emerges from the abstract, universal form of personhood lead their lives within this ongoing interplay and find themselves as more or less highly estimated whos reflected within it. They belong to it, and so it is part of their mirrored identity as who they are, namely, estimated and estimating players in a freely constituted interplay of powers.