Content

Foreword

1By way of introduction: Precious little

2Loosening the ground: Thinking about society, thinking society

2.1Society, needs and wants, language

2.2What is λόγος?

2.3Opinion: Holding things and each other to be (whatness and whoness)

2.4Showing oneself off as somewho

2.5The openness of three-dimensional time as the enabling dimension within which society is situated

2.6Living well and being somewho – The need to interrogate the tradition

3Further outline of the phenomenon of whoness

3.1Bearing a name and standing in estimation in the community through valuing interplay

3.2Human social being as self-presentation and showing-off in the 3D-temporal clearing in an interplay of estimable reputability (politeness, pride, vulnerability, arrogance, conceit)

3.3Further exemplary phenomena of standing and not standing as somewho (flattery, manliness) — The existential possibility of coming to one’s very own, genuine stand as self

3.3.1Digression: Dialectic of self and other – Wrestling with Plato, Hegel, Heidegger

3.3.1.1Preliminary considerations when approaching Plato’s and Hegel’s dialectical thinking

3.3.1.2Approaching an existential dialectic of self and other through an interpretation of a passage from Plato’s Parmenides

3.3.1.3The Hegelian dialectic of the concept, primal splitting and closing together

3.3.1.4Heideggerian selfhood as a “shining-back” from being-in-the-world

3.3.1.5Interpreting the dialectic of primal splitting and closing together with regard to selfhood

4The satisfaction of wants and the striving to have more

4.1Economics and chrematistics

4.2Weber’s conception of economic activity

4.3The Cartesian cast of economics

4.4Schumpeter’s equilibrium theory

4.5Aristotle on money and exchange — Money as a medium practically unifying social usages

4.6Endless money-making?

5Ontology of exchange

5.1Commodity exchange and the necessity of rethinking Aristotelean δύναμις

5.2Productive know-how, acquisitive know-how?

5.3Commodity exchange not guided by the insight of know-how

5.4Two complementary, reciprocal pairs of δυνάμεις: Reified value and desire

5.5Recapitulation and the coming together of goods in commerce

5.5.1A side-glance at Hegel’s treatment of actuality, possibility, contingency, necessity and freedom

5.6Exchange as core phenomenon of social intercourse: Interchange and interplay

5.6.1Reciprocally showing off who one is in the interplay of mutual estimation

5.6.2The interplay of powers of self-presentation – engendering trust

5.6.3Mutual estimation: Personhood, esteem and respect, the power play over who-standing and the possible intimacy between you-and-me

6Justice

6.1Justice as a fundamental social phenomenon of having one’s fair share (Aristotle) – Strauss’ misconception of ontological origins – The goods of living: valuable things and esteem – Ongoing competitive interplay estimating each other’s abilities

6.2Distributive and commutative justice

6.3Marxist critiques of capitalist social relations as unjust

6.3.1The untenability of the labour theory of value as a theory of just exchange masking exploitation

6.3.2Groundlessness of sociating interplay

6.3.3The untenability of the theory of surplus value as a theory of capitalist exploitation

6.3.4Injustice of capitalist wage-labour per se?

6.4The just distribution of the goods of living

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

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

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

6.8The gainful game among competitive players

6.9Recent debates on justice in Anglophone moral philosophy and the disappearance of commutative justice

6.9.1Walzer’s plurality of distribution systems

6.9.2Conceptions of distributive justice and the welfare state

6.10Critical appraisal of Nozickian libertarianism

6.10.1The legitimate founding of a state

6.10.2The original appropriation of (landed) property

6.10.3An attack on libertarian freedom conceived as individual caprice

6.11A closer look at Rawls

6.11.1The “original position”

6.11.2Property-owning democracy

6.12Anomalies in the gainful game and the political power play

7Interlude and recapitulation with some intermediate conclusions: Everyday living of finite human beings – Security and insecurity

7.1Securing the polity of civil society – An initial determination of government (Schmitt, Locke, Kant) – The rule of law

7.2Exchange as the starting-point of social living (Plato, Hegel)

7.3The reliability of things (Heidegger)

7.4Exchange essentially unreliable

7.5Free market exchange as both an unreliable and reliable form of sociation

7.6Money-mediated exchange abstract and reified (Marx)

7.7Risky enterprise and secure jobs

8The short reach of Cartesian certainty and Leibniz’ principle of reason into the social science of economics

8.1Leibniz’ principle of reason as a general “grand principle”

8.1.1Digression: The principle of reason further considered

8.1.1.1Leibniz

8.1.1.2Hegel

8.1.1.3Nietzsche

8.1.1.4Heidegger

8.1.1.5Anaximander and the fairness of interplay

8.1.1.6Deepening the interpretation of Anaximander

8.2“The economic law of motion of modern society” (Marx)

8.3Adam Smith’s notion of labour-value

8.4Economics as a quantitative empirical science (Aristotle, Hayek)

8.5The disclosive truth of markets

8.6Stock market estimations of the future

8.7Market irrationality, sentiment and psychology as phenomena of mood

9Sociation via reified interplay, the invisible and the visible hand

9.1Social democracy, reified sociating interplay and caring-for in a capitalist economy – Caring for one’s own world and indifference to others (Heidegger’s Being and Time)

9.2Self-interest and mutual caring-for in exchange interplay

9.3Reified sociating interplay and purportedly ‘inhuman’ alienation of human being

9.4The wage-labour relation and caring-for – Co-operation and conflict – Hierarchy and reified discipline – Economic democracy and total economic control

9.5The invisible hand and the ontological possibility of a caring capitalism – Unlimited economic growth through caring for each other

9.6The set-up and the endless cycle of self-augmentation of reified value (Marx, Heidegger) – The historical possibility of the side-step into endless mutual caring-for

9.6.1The gainful game

9.6.2The set-up

9.7State intervention in the economic interplay of civil society

9.8Uncertainty of income-earning – The ‘law’ of social inertia and the tendency toward conservation of a way of life – Openness to the future vs. risk-aversion – The ensconcing of particular interests behind protectionist barriers

9.9The manifestation of the visible hand in the shape of bureaucracy

9.10State intervention as a visible helping hand for the invisible hand – An asserted unconditional right to be cared for – Caring-for that “leaps in” vs. caring-for that “leaps ahead” (Heidegger)

9.11The paternalistic ‘all-caring’ state – Taxation and its tendentially asphyxiating hold on civil society

10Social power and government

10.1Ontology of social power

10.1.1Recapitulation: Various kinds of social power

10.1.2Aristotle on social and political power

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

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

10.4The “restlesse desire of Power after power” and the necessity of the Leviathan – Straussian “vanity” and the inevitable ongoing mutual estimating of who-status and individual powers – The modern individual subject as the foundation and starting-point for deriving the Leviathan

10.5Legitimacy of the Leviathan – An arbiter in the “Competition of Riches, Honour, Command, or other power” – The predicament that “nothing is more easily broken than a mans word”

10.6The individualization of the truth of being (Protagoras, Heidegger) – The ultimate socio-ontological source of strife – The finite process of resolving differences among individual perspectival views

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

11The socio-ontological constitution of ‘we ourselves’

11.1Dialectical movement from the sensuous givenness of world to the identity of ego and world – The dialectic of recognition – “Ego that is we and we that is ego” (Hegel’s Phenomenology)

11.2Universal self-consciousness and irrepressible, questioning, singular individuality – The ever-broken mediation between singularity and universality concretely realized in ethical life

11.3The question of who: Selfhood, my self, you-and-I (Heidegger’s 1934 lectures and Being and Time)

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

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”

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

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

12Government and the state

12.1Recapitulation via Locke: The liberal conception of government, its critique and socio-ontological grounding in the power interplay of civil society

12.2The totalitarian state as a counter-casting to liberalism – The yearning for a totally controlled “organic construction” at the pinnacle of productionist metaphysics (Ernst Jünger)

12.2.1Heidegger’s anti-liberal interpretation of the German tradition in 1933 (W. v. Humboldt, Kant, Hegel)

12.3The forever contradictory, moving realization of freedom in civil society and state as power play (Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie)

12.3.1Diremption of particularity from the universal in civil society and their mediation

12.3.2The police and civic corporation as supplements to the interplay of civil society

12.3.3A problematic transition from civil society to the state – ‘Infinite’, singular affirmation of the concept of freedom through an ethos of free and fair interplay – The chimæra of a final resolution of the power play

12.3.4The inner constitution of the state and the singularity that remains plural – The endlessly contentious issue of taxation – Never-ending controversy over concrete conceptions of the universal good – The two-way power-mediation between civil society and state - The media and freedom of speech

12.3.5Division of powers within the state in accord with the concept of freedom – Hereditary monarchy “outside human freedom” true to the hermeneutic cast of productionist metaphysics – The concept of freedom does not come to a unified closure – The people’s (mis-)trust of the state

12.3.6The transition from civil society to state reconsidered: The power play over sociating estimation and identity in belonging to a political whole — Constitutional rules of play for the ongoing political power struggle

12.3.7The reality of freedom as the shared, ethical social living of a people and its fracturing, through which free societies remain in flux

12.3.8Hegel’s critique of the liberal conception of state – Kant’s “idea of the original contract”

12.3.9Pre-ontological ethical ‘second nature’ and ontological insight into the political realm

12.3.10The dispensability of the philosopher king and the precipitation of socio-ontological structures in historically lived, ethical usages

13Democracy

13.1Democracy, competitive electoral struggle and majority will vs. individual freedom

13.1.1The political power struggle for estimation as a worthy politician – The government’s power to enact concrete policy and its mirroring in democratic public debate – The infection of the universal good with particular interests – Protectionism

13.1.2The tendential danger of the dissolution of freedom in merely democratically mediated, state-posited will – The erosion of the freedom of interplay through the sham universal of redistributive social justice – Constitutional law as a bulwark against merely positive law

13.1.3Schumpeter’s competition theory of democracy – The democratic We not merely a summation of individual wills – The legitimacy of democratically elected government – The vacillating vagaries of democratic electoral power struggles – The necessary universality of the democratic vote

13.1.4The socio-ontological isomorphism between the competitive gainful game and the competitive democratic struggle for political power more closely considered – The democratic constitution of a people as We with its customary way of life – Democracy’s wavering course between an appetite for freedom and a craving for security

13.1.5Carl Schmitt’s critique of the “parliamentary law-making state”– The contradiction between formal law-making procedures and substantial rights – Direct plebiscitary democracy

13.2Democracy, freedom and justice: A recapitulation

14Global whoness and global power plays

14.1Whoness of a people

14.2The state as the universal that remains particular in the interplay among foreign powers

14.3Brute international power interplays

14.4Nationalism, protectionism and free, estimative power interplay among peoples

15Bibliography

16Index